


grieving for the living

by ifearnocolors



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Beleriand, Blood and Violence, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Dark, Explicit Language, F/M, First Kinslaying (Tolkien), Gen, Ghost Fëanor, Gore, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Second Kinslaying | Sack of Doriath, Self-Harm, Silmarils, Suicide Attempt, Symbolism, Terrible Coping Mechanisms, The Void, Therapy, Third Kinslaying (Tolkien), Valinor, War, War Trauma, Warning: Eöl, celegorm redemption arc, celegorm-centric, dante's inferno-esque void punishments, everyone gets a redemption arc!, feanor POV, feanor redemption arc, the first 2 chapters are cute and then it gets dark very quickly, these bois are not okay, very deliberate usage of quenya vs. sindarin names at all times, with a few creative liberties here and there
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-29
Updated: 2021-02-24
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:22:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 16
Words: 33,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28332321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ifearnocolors/pseuds/ifearnocolors
Summary: so yeah, it’s a fireit’s a goddamn blaze in the darkand you started ityou started itAfter Feanor dies, he wakes up suspended in darkness in front of a screen of light and color. His punishment in the Void is to watch: watch the ways in which his oath affects the world, watch his legacy become synonymous with death and sin, watch each of his sons fall into madness. But Celegorm’s downward spiral began long before the Silmarils were created.
Relationships: Amras & Amrod & Caranthir & Celegorm & Curufin & Fëanor & Maedhros & Maglor (Tolkien), Aredhel/Celegorm | Turcafinwë, Celegorm | Turcafinwë & Curufin | Curufinwë, Celegorm | Turcafinwë & Fëanor | Curufinwë, Celegorm | Turcafinwë & Huan, Celegorm | Turcafinwë & Oromë, Fingon | Findekáno/Maedhros | Maitimo, Fëanor | Curufinwë & Sons of Fëanor, Fëanor | Curufinwë/Nerdanel
Comments: 162
Kudos: 110





	1. 1

**Author's Note:**

> this story began as a character study of celegorm from feanor’s POV. it’s still celegorm-centric, but has now expanded to explore all of the feanorians in depth. i poured my heart & soul into this fic in a way that i never have before-- it's been my baby since june 2020, but i'm finally ready to start sharing it with you all. i truly hope it resonates with you in some of the ways it has for me!

Feanaro liked to claim that his third son was born at dawn. “Just as Laurelin’s light crested the mountains,” he would say, gesturing with sweeping hands as if to illustrate the golden rays’ grand curve. A glorious welcome to a new life, as if the heavens themselves had blessed it. 

The truth was far less glamorous. Nerdanel’s labor was long and arduous and it came to a close in that dusky, twilit space just before daylight, when darkness and a filmy chill still cloaked the sky. Feanaro’s third son came out covered in slick scarlet blood and he and the midwife, dead on their feet after a sleepless, stressful night, stood frozen around the bed. 

And then he _screamed._ And screamed and screamed and screamed, until Laurelin really did rise over the faraway peaks. There would be no sleep for anyone that night, nor the one after that. 

“Tyelkormo,” an exhausted Nerdanel named the child on his twelfth night of existence, pressing her sweat-beaded temple with firm fingertips. The screaming still had not stopped. “Hasty riser.” Whether for his temper or for the early hours during which he seemed to delight in squalling extra-loud, Feanaro did not know. Perhaps both. 

Feanaro tacked on Turcafinwe for strength. And the not-quite-dawn child with strange silver hair and inexhaustible lungs screamed louder. 

…

“At _aaaa_ ,” whined Kanafinwe, both hands clapped over his small ears. “Nelyo and I can’t sleep.” 

“I’m sorry, Kano,” said Feanaro through gritted teeth, raising his voice so it carried over the shrill screams that permeated the thin walls. “Your brother is hard to placate, it seems.” 

“What’s placate?” Nelyafinwe was lying flat in his bed with a pillow over his head, muffling his voice. 

Feanaro ran a hand down his face. “It means to soothe. Just try to ignore the noise and go to sleep, okay? All babies cry sometimes. It’s just what they do.” 

“Kano didn’t,” said Nelyo, sitting up. There were dark shadows under his eyes to match the ones under Feanaro’s own. His face shone pale in the moonlight, freckles standing out like dots of ink. “Not _all_ the time, anyway. I remember.” 

“I think there’s something wrong with Tyelkormo,” said Kanafinwe. 

“There is nothing wrong with Tyelkormo,” Feanaro sighed. He was too tired to be having this conversation right now. “He’s barely two weeks old. Soon, you two will have a new friend to play with. Just be patient with him.” 

“I don’t _want_ a new friend--” Kano started to protest, but Feanaro was already closing the door. The screams were louder in the corridor, echoing down the hall like the shrieks of a banshee. Valar help me, he thought. 

…

In conversation with others, Feanaro called Tyelkormo robust, energetic, a natural athlete. He bragged to his half-brothers about how quickly his third son learned to walk, then run, then swim, how spirited and hearty and every other synonym for his father-name he was. In private conversation inside his own mind, he called Tyelkormo a terror. 

Tyelko liked to run into ponds fully clothed and pelt his brothers with handfuls of mud and dig in the dirt for worms with his bare hands. He liked to scream at the top of his lungs, not only when he was angry, which was often, but also when he was excited, which was just as often. Nerdanel found him sitting on the garden roof one afternoon, contently chewing on a handful of pine needles, small muddy footprints painting the white gutter he’d used to climb up. Tyelkormo screamed when she took him down and tried to wriggle out of her arms. “I’m _foraging,_ Amme!” he yelled. 

“How do _you_ know what foraging means?” said Kano, who was sitting calmly on a bench with his small wooden flute. “You’re too young.” Kanafinwe had no great tolerance for his little brother, who liked to headbutt him in the legs and trip him during running races. He preferred to lock himself in his room with his sheet music and his books. 

Tyelko stuck out his tongue at Kano, covered in chewed-up bits of pine needle, and relished the shrill “ _Ewww!”_ he got in response. 

“Look what I found in the garden today!” shrieked Tyelko later that afternoon, cupping something in his grubby hands. His hair, still that unnatural pale silver, was full of small twigs. Nelyo had wrangled it into a ponytail that sprouted straight up from the top of his head. 

“Please use your indoor voice, honey,” Nerdanel sighed. “Amme has a headache.” 

“But _look!”_ he said, jumping up and down so energetically that the framed pictures on the side table rattled. “I found him all by myself!” 

He opened his hands and a blurred _something_ shot out and vanished. Nerdanel and Kano screamed in unison. “What was that?” Feanaro demanded. 

Tyelko was already scrambling under the couch on his hands and knees. “Nooooo! Come back!” 

Feanaro dragged him out by the back of his collar, noting with a grimace that his clothes were covered in grass stains again. “Tyelkormo Turcafinwe, you tell us what creature you brought inside this house _this instant,_ young man.” 

“He’s my friend,” Tyelkormo said, trying to wriggle out of Feanaro’s hands. “A big frog! He’s really nice. He likes to swim like me!” 

Kanafinwe shrieked and clambered on top of the piano with a clang of keys. 

…

It took a few years for Feanaro to realize that in every letter he received from his least favorite half-brother, Nolofinwe used the same turns of phrase to describe his daughter as he himself did for Tyelkormo. “Irisse is a free spirit,” Nolofinwe wrote, “determined… strong-willed… passionate.” They were almost exactly the same age. Feanaro shuddered at the very thought of the chaos they might cause as a team. 

“There’s a letter in the mail, Atar,” said Nelyafinwe one afternoon, brandishing the envelope at him. 

Feanaro slit it neatly with his thumbnail and groaned out loud after skimming the first two sentences of the card inside. “Is it something bad?” his oldest son asked seriously. 

“No, not at all, Nelyo,” he amended. “We’ve been invited to a big party. You’ll get to meet all of your cousins.” 

Tyelko popped out from behind the couch and screamed “YAY!” so piercingly that Feanaro thought one of his eardrums might have burst. 

It took the better part of two hours to corral his sons into the carriage that would bring them to Finwe’s house, mostly because Tyelko decided to leap into a dusty haystack in his neatly pressed party clothes. Nerdanel wrestled him into her lap to redo his braids. _“Behave,”_ she warned, pinching his cheek, “or you won’t get to have any cake.” 

“There’s _cake?”_ he cried, outraged that nobody had mentioned this crucial detail. 

He spent most of the carriage ride elbowing Kano, drumming his feet on the seat, and babbling loudly about how his loose tooth was “dangling by a _string!”_ Feanaro ground his teeth and said “That’s nice.” 

When the carriage stopped, Nerdanel snagged her three sons before they could leap out onto the grass. “Be nice to your cousins,” she told them, looking at each of them in turn and lingering longest on Tyelkormo’s small shiny-clean face. “And be polite to all your aunts and uncles, and to Grandpa. We want to make new friends, don’t we?” 

Kanafinwe was pouting. “I wanted to bring my harp,” he said. “I don’t like talking to new people.” 

“That’s because you’re a scaredy-cat, Macalaure,” Tyelko said unhelpfully. 

“Be _nice,”_ Nerdanel said again, and opened the carriage door. Like a cricket springing free from a cage, Tyelko shoved past his brothers and was gone, a small blur tearing across the grass in the distance.

…

Feanaro was in the middle of a discussion with his half-brothers-- really more of a bragging contest threatening to verge into an argument-- when one of Finarfin’s miscellaneous blonde kids barged into the middle of their triangle and wailed, “Tyelko and Irisse are _murdering_ each other!” 

Everyone turned to look at the picnic tables, and sure enough, Feanaro saw his son swinging a large, muddy stick in the air as a small girl pelted him with handfuls of pebbles. Both were screaming shrilly. 

“Hey!” Tyelkormo yelled when Feanaro pulled him away, wrestling the makeshift sword out of his hand. “I’m trying to _duel_ , Ata!” 

“ _Why_ in Eru's name are you dueling your cousin?” Feanaro demanded. “You two are disrupting a nice family dinner!” 

“He started it,” Irisse shrieked. Her white dress was streaked with mud. “He said I run like a girl!” 

“Well, you _are_ a girl,” Tyelko yelled, kicking Feanaro in the shin in his struggle to escape. “And you cheated, too!” 

Irisse scooped up another handful of dusty stones from the path and hurled them. They rained down on Feanaro’s shoulders, clattering as they bounced off. “I did not! I beat you fair and square. You’re the one who runs like a girl!” 

“Stop it _right now,_ ” Feanaro bellowed, managing to snag the back of Tyelko’s grass-stained collar, “or neither of you are getting any cake later!” 

Irisse froze, one fist pulled back mid-fire, and reluctantly let go of her handful of pebbles. “Fine,” she mumbled, kicking at the dust. “Wanna be on teams, then?” 

Tyelko went limp and squirmed out of his father’s grasp. “I have a loose tooth that’s hanging by a string,” he said cautiously, by way of peace offering. “It’s super gross.” 

“ _I_ already lost my front ones,” Irisse said proudly, flashing a smile. “I tripped over the front step and they came out.” 

“Was there _blood?”_

_“Tons.”_

They tore away across the meadow before Feanaro could interject a warning about playing nice, leaving a small cloud of dust in their wake. He slunk back to his half-brothers, brushing bits of dusty pebble off the front of his shirt. 

Fifteen minutes later, when slices of the coveted cake had at last been handed out to each grandchild, a piercing screech tore through the air. Tyelkormo spit something out onto his plate with a clink. “My _tooth!”_

…

“I’m going to marry Irisse one day,” Tyelkormo announced on the way home. “I even gave her my tooth.” He looked very proud of himself. 

“Ew,” said Kano, scrunching up his face. “She’s our cousin.” 

Nelyo turned pink and pretended to look out the window. 

…

Feanaro gritted his teeth. “I thought you guys were making cards for Amme and your new brother,” he said in as mild a voice as he could muster. 

“I _am!”_ Tyelko had an upside-down sticker on his forehead and looked like he’d been swimming in glitter. He held up a clump of torn papers stuck together with dripping glue. “I’m doing a collage.” 

“Maybe you could sign it at the bottom,” Feanaro suggested, closing his eyes for a moment. He was far too tired for this. “Write ‘Love, Tyelko.’”

“I hate writing,” Tyelko announced, snatching the scissors out of Nelyo’s hand. “And babies. I want to go to the pond now. Can we?”

“No, you’re going to meet your new baby brother now,” Feanaro reminded him. “Remember to keep your voices _down.”_

Kanafinwe tugged on Feanaro’s sleeve. “I wrote a song for Amme, Ata,” he said in his most angelic voice. 

“That’s poopy,” Tyelko said, smearing more glitter onto his collage. “Your songs are sappy and dumb.” 

“Well, at least I know how to write my _name…”_

They scuffled quietly the whole way down the hall until Nelyo promised to give them each a piece of candy if they were quiet. Clustering around the white crib, they each took their turn peering inside. Feanaro lifted Tyelko up so he could see over, and he stared in a rare moment of silence at the baby’s scrunched-up face and tufts of jet-black hair.

“Why’s he so _red_?” he said in a loud whisper. 

…

Morifinwe, who Nerdanel named Carnistir, was a solemn, grumpy-faced baby whose default emotion seemed to be vague irritation, but after the deafening screams of his third son’s infancy, Feanaro counted himself lucky. Now there were two redheads in the family, three with dark hair, and only Tyelkormo stood apart with his jarring silver. He was rapidly proving himself an outlier in more ways than one. 

Nelyo and Kano loved baby Moryo, and were happy to play with him in his pen, handing him toys to chew and smiling at the perpetual flush that gave him his mother-name. Tyelko preferred to run off into the woods for hours at a time and come back after dusk with scrapes on his knees, tracking leaves and dirt into the house. Nelyofinwe lived to please his parents and did whatever they asked, and Kano was brilliant, if a bit reclusive, with his books and his harp. Tyelkormo’s talents included tree-climbing, fistfighting, and a complete inability to speak in indoor tones. 

If Feanaro was honest with himself, he would admit that he did little to stop his third son from coming and going. He savored the hours of peace during which Tyelkormo was outside and he was free to work undisturbed in his forge, and internally cringed when slamming doors and elevated voices heralded his return each night. And he rarely dwelt on what, exactly, Tyelko got up to in the forest for hours each day. 

Until, that is, he barged into the dining room one evening for dinner, caked with mud as per usual, shirt torn at the hem, and trailed by a massive, shaggy lump of a dog that plunked itself down beside the table as if it belonged there. 

“ _What,”_ Feanaro said hoarsely, “is _that?”_

“His name is Huan,” said Tyelko around a mouthful of mashed potatoes, as if the name of the beast, as well as its presence in Feanaro’s home, was self-evident. 

“I-I--” Feanaro spluttered. “I mean-- where did it _come_ from?” 

“ _He_ was given to me,” Tyelkormo said proudly. “As a gift. From Orome.” 

“You’re lying,” said Kanafinwe at once. 

“I am not! Orome is training me in hunting. He gave me Huan as a companion.” He brandished his fork in his brother’s face. 

“Please put down your fork, honey,” said Nerdanel. 

Tyelko glared and dropped it with a clatter. “I’m _not_ lying.” 

“I don’t doubt you, hon, but I also don’t quite understand. Are you sure you mean Orome as in… the Vala of the hunt?” 

“What other Orome is there?” Tyelko said stubbornly. “He’s teaching me how to hunt and he says I have _potential,_ so he gave me Huan. You _have_ to let him stay! He’s super gentle and he’s my best friend and I can understand him when he talks!” Beside him, the massive dog lifted its shaggy head in an almost self-righteous manner, as if to say _it’s true._

Feanaro ran a hand down his face. “Why didn’t you tell us about this-- training-- at the start?”

“‘Cause then you wouldn’t have let me do it.” Huan thumped his fluffy gray-brown tail in agreement. 

Moryo drummed his small fists on the table, looking mildly peeved as usual. Feanaro looked at Nerdanel and she looked back. “All right,” she said at last, “Huan can stay if you take care of him. But I’m not comfortable with the idea of you running around with a Vala in the forest all day, honey. You’re too young to be learning how to hunt.” 

“That’s not _fair!”_ Tyelko cried shrilly. Feanaro resisted the urge to cover his ears with his hands. 

“You can keep training with Orome,” he said impulsively, overriding Nerdanel. “As long as it continues to keep you out of trouble.” Speaking over his wife’s incredulous sound of protest, he continued, “It’s not our place to contradict the will of the Valar.” 

“Since when have _you,_ of all people, cared about the will of the Valar?” Nerdanel demanded, but Tyelkormo was already pushing back his chair. “Bye!” he yelled, stuffing two dinner rolls into his mouth and vanishing with Huan at his heels. 

Feanaro watched him go and told himself that he had made the correct decision for the family. The _only_ decision. 

…

That same summer, Feanaro finally completed his life’s work. Three gems, harder and purer than any substance in the universe, that gleamed and shone with the light of the Valar themselves. He wiped the sweat from his brow with a grimy cloth and called his family in to look. “The Silmarils,” he said with a flourish. 

“I love them, Atar,” said Nelyo immediately, green eyes searching his father’s face for approval. Kanafinwe hesitated and nodded more slowly, unsmiling. The jewels sparkled and glowed, reflected doubly in Moryo’s wide dark eyes. 

“Nice.” Tyelkormo echoed his brothers’ sentiments, wrangling Huan backwards. The giant hound moved with him, leashless and fluid despite his size, regarding the gems on the wooden table with a mournful glint in his strangely sentient eyes. “But… what do they do?” 

Feanaro didn’t realize he was glaring daggers at his third son until he felt his jaw crack with the pressure of being set so hard. He opened his mouth to explain the gems’ thousands of essential properties and inexplicably came up blank. “How dare you?” he said instead, more harshly than he’d intended. “You _dare_ disrespect the product of my years of labor, the life-source of my soul, the--” 

But Tyelko was already gone. 

…

The balmy summer dawn painted the windowsills chartreuse. Warm rain drummed on the glass panes. Feanaro squinted, bleary-eyed, at the tap, filling himself a glass of water. It squeaked when he switched it off. 

The back door banged loudly, and he cursed under his breath as his glass sloshed over and soaked his socks. “Who’s there?” 

The shutters were closed. Feanaro yanked on the cord, expecting to see a dripping Tyelkormo at the door, Huan in tow. Lately, the pair returned later and later every night from their training in the woods, creeping in through unlocked doors and open windows and falling into bed at one, two, three AM. Instead, a jarring sight greeted his barely-awake eyes. 

“Irisse? What are you doing here?” 

Nolofinwe’s free spirit had shot up in the years since she’d pelted Tyelko with rocks at the family reunion, now tall and spindly with wide eyes in a face of pale angles. She was wearing a soaked white nightgown and her dark hair, chopped unevenly at her chin, was plastered flat on her head. Her feet were bare. 

“I came to get Tyelko,” she said. “We’re going hunting today.” 

“At _dawn?_ ” Feanaro tried not to show his frustration. It would be nice, he thought sharply, surprising even himself with the jaded tone, if his son would bother to communicate his plans with the family every once in a while. 

“Yes,” said Irisse, not breaking eye contact with Feanaro. Her face seemed to pose a challenge, silently daring him to disagree. “Is he home?” 

Feanaro wasn’t nearly awake enough for this. “Does your atar know you’re here?” 

Irisse didn’t bother to answer. She slipped past Feanaro into the kitchen, leaving spongy footprints on the tile, and looked up at the ceiling. Someone-- more than one someone-- was bounding, crashing down the stairs, a chaotic mess of feet and paws pounding the creaky wood. 

“Hold up, young man,” Feanaro demanded as Huan and Tyelko barrelled past him, and Irisse’s rain-soaked face lit up. “Where are you going? When will you be back?” 

“The woods. Later,” was the only response he got before they were gone, door slamming shut so hard that raindrops sprinkled the muddy floor. Feanaro closed the shutters and trudged back upstairs, not pretending he cared enough to track them down.

…

Feanaro’s fifth son was born at noon, a blessed time. Everyone crowded around the crib, a tighter cluster than last time, more heads bowing down to look. Moryo sat on Nelyo’s shoulders and Huan wove around the forest of spindly boy-legs, wet nose and moppy fur tickling knees and calves. 

“I’m going to teach him to hunt,” Tyelko said a bit too loudly, hanging over the side of the crib with a bright gleam in his pale eyes. 

“He looks like you, Atar,” said Kanafinwe. 

Feanaro had donned all three Silmarils, set in a special silver coronet, for the occasion, and he felt like the king of the world. “He does,” he said, bending over to see for himself. “Curufinwe is his name. Curvo.” 

If he hadn’t been so fixated on his newest son, a perfect tiny likeness of himself, and the way the gems on his forehead glittered in his wide liquid eyes, he would have seen Nelyo’s face fall, shoulders slumping as he set Moryo back on the floor.


	2. 2

One dark, mild night just before midsummer, Tyelko kicked open the screen door and dragged something huge, limp, and tawny-coated into the silent kitchen. Nerdanel screamed and dropped a soapy plate into the sink. It shattered. 

“I shot it myself,” he said proudly, hoisting the dead thing into the air so they could see. The young deer’s eyes were open and glassy, staring blankly at nothing. A silver arrow was embedded in its side. “Orome says my aim is getting better every day. Soon I’ll get to learn how to skin it.” His hands were slick with blood. Feanaro was viscerally reminded of the way he’d looked seconds after birth, curled-up and dripping scarlet, still as a tiny corpse in the silence before the screams. 

“Tyelkormo Turcafinwe,” Nerdanel said faintly. “You take that outside immediately. We do not bring  _ carcasses _ into the house.” 

There was a strange glint in Tyelko’s eyes. “Aren’t you proud of me, Amme?” he challenged, throwing the limp deer over his shoulder as if it was nothing more than a fur coat. Feanaro tried not to shudder at the thought of handling a once-living thing so casually. “I’m going to be Orome’s best hunter. I’ve been practicing every day. I can hit any mark with my bow now.”

The screen door slammed shut behind him and Feanaro heard the dull thump as he threw the deer down into the grass. “Wash your hands, Tyelko,” he demanded. “And then go up to bed. It’s late. Your brothers are already asleep.” 

The tap foamed and dripped pink rivulets as the blood slid down and away. Tyelkormo stared at his clean white hands, eyes hard, and said nothing. But Huan lifted his head and looked straight at Feanaro, startling sentience stirring in his beady black dog-eyes, and for an instant he could have sworn he heard a voice whisper  _ he is unwanted.  _

Feanaro fingered the Silmarils on his brow and thought, No. He makes himself an outlier.

…

Kano’s pale hands slipped over the harpstrings so seamlessly they floated. He sang like he breathed, instinctually, softly, and the notes flew, not fell, better than birdsong or wind, better than thought. Feanaro’s eyes slid around the garden, left to right, and absorbed a panorama of perfection. Two heads of bright, curled amber, flamed like the fire in his  _ fea _ that gave him his name. Four inky black to match his own. Smiles and clasped hands, a flawless family portrait absent any traces of clashing silver. 

He held Curufinwe in his lap, the Silmarils on a gold chain around his youngest son’s neck. Curvo was the only one allowed to wear them, other than himself, and it filled Feanaro with pride to see them glow on the collar of his small duplicate. Resplendent, as they should be. 

…

The room that Tyelko shared with Kano and Moryo was immaculate except for the corner that stored his bed and small table. The sheets were a twisted, crumpled ball, pillow smashed, mud-crusted boots tossed carelessly on the floor, and the table overflowed with junk. 

“I’m not cleaning it,” Kanafinwe whined when Feanaro asked about the mess. “We keep  _ our _ side of the room neat. Tyelko has to pick up his own stuff.” But Tyelko was so rarely home that after a day or two, Feanaro gritted his teeth and dragged in a soapy bucket and rag to do the job himself. 

The twisted sheets, once unrolled, were caked with dust. How long had it been, Feanaro mused vaguely, since he had slept in his own bed? Two weeks? Three? He yanked open the cobwebbed drawer of the small table, and a stack of papers fell out onto the floor. 

Feanaro knelt down and ruffled quickly through them. They were all covered in Tyelko’s writing, big scrawled letters in dull pencil, and another, less familiar hand, thin and spidery. A sentence jumped out at him and he paused, reading it again.  _ You’re my only friend, Irisse. _

There was more.  _ Nobody in my family likes me. Well I don’t like them either, so ha. OK fine that’s not true. Maybe Huan and I will go off and live in the woods. You can come.  _

_ Sometimes I feel so angry I could kill somebody. It scares me.  _

Feanaro stuffed the letters back into the drawer so fast they bent and crumpled. He could feel a headache coming on. He wasn’t sure he knew his third son at all anymore, and worse, he wasn’t sure he particularly cared. 

…

Several summers came and went before Tyelkormo finally returned from his training with Orome. Feanaro had not seen more than a glimpse of him in several years, and he would not have recognized the person in his doorway if not for the pale silver hair that had always unnerved him, now tied back with a cord, unbraided.

Tyelko was taller than everyone except Nelyo now, with broad shoulders and callouses on his hands and a quiver of razor-sharp arrows slung over his back with a band of leather. There was a new hardness to his eyes, and his shiny smile was wilder than before; like the upturned grin of a beast, you had to guess whether it was one of joy or malice. Huan, weaving around his legs like a huge shaggy mop with a pink tongue, suddenly seemed tamer than his master. Curvo squealed and tried unsuccessfully to jump on his back.

“He doesn’t let anyone ride him,” Tyelko said, snatching up his little brother and letting him dangle from his hand like a sack of flour. “Huan greatly prizes his dignity.” 

Big words from the one who would have flicked Curvo’s upturned nose and proclaimed him a poopyhead the last time he’d sat down for dinner with the family. Then again, Curvo hadn’t even been born yet when Tyelko had first left for the forest. Feanaro closed his eyes for a second. Had it really been so long?

“I want to learn how to skin a deer,” Curvo cried, kicking his small feet. “Please? Ata already lets me help him in the forge!” 

“When you’re  _ older,”  _ interjected Nerdanel, frowning at Feanaro. He was too engrossed in the delicate tilt of his wineglass, and the way the Silmarils in their circlet caught the glassy light and sparkled, to notice. “No elflings should be skinning or forging anything.” 

Nelyo forced a calm smile. “It’s very nice to have you back, Tyelko,” he said, directing his words more at Kano and Moryo than at Tyelko himself, prompting them to stop scowling and be gracious too. They mumbled their assent, but Feanaro wasn’t listening. He was thinking of his gems, and something grander: a glimmer of foresight he couldn’t quite grasp. The Silmarils were the best thing that had ever happened to his family; he was sure of it. 

He lifted his glass with a steady hand, dark liquid mirror-still inside. “To the S--” 

Nerdanel glared daggers at him; he stopped abruptly and revised. “To Tyelkormo. Welcome home.”

…

“Atar, Tyelko’s not in his bed.” 

Feanaro sat up, head throbbing in the pitch-darkness, and groped blindly for the extinguished candle on his bedside table. He lit it with fumbling hands, squinting at his fourth son’s flushed face as it lit up in flickering amber. “It’s the middle of the night, Moryo,” he muttered. “Why are you even awake?”

“‘Cause he was making a ton of noise,” said Moryo stubbornly, “and he woke me up. I think he went out the window, ‘cause it’s open. Huan is gone too.” 

Feanaro closed his eyes, feeling the static prickle of sleep threaten to seal them up for good again. “If you’re not gonna help me find him,” Moryo said petulantly, “I’ll get Amme.” 

“Don’t you dare, Carnistir Morifinwe. She and the baby need rest.” And, Feanaro thought privately, he was very much  _ not  _ in the mood to deal with one of Nerdanel’s tongue-lashings, which had increased in both frequency and intensity with her latest-- “and  _ last!”,  _ as she stubbornly insisted-- pregnancy. 

“But you have to  _ punish _ him! He woke me up,” groused Moryo, tugging on the corner of the comforter as if trying to pull Feanaro out of bed. “I don’t want to share a room with Tyelko and his smelly old dog anyway.” 

“We can discuss it in the morning,” Feanaro sighed, holding out the candle for Moryo to blow out. The gesture was simple:  _ this conversation is over. _ Moryo glowered at him, brows furrowing under his unevenly chopped bangs, before puffing out his cheeks and plunging the room back into darkness. 

Of course, Tyelko was not there to discuss anything in the morning, nor the morning after that. He wandered into the garden at dusk on the third day, Huan on his trail, as casual as if he had not been gone at all. “Do you like my new coat, Kano?” he asked, displaying it. It was made out of the dark fur of what was unmistakably some recently-skinned animal. 

“Where have you  _ been _ ?” Kanafinwe demanded. “Atar!” 

Feanaro’s voice was hoarse when he was finally done shouting. Nerdanel’s cheeks were red from where she’d swiped at falling tears, again and again with the same damp corner of her sleeve. Tyelkormo’s eyes were blank. Instead of jumping up and screaming back as he might once have done, he had sat there like a statue, motionless and silent, during the entire tirade. The passivity, the  _ control  _ where once he had had none, grated at Feanaro’s frayed nerves like nothing else. 

“Why aren’t you  _ answering  _ me?” he snarled, backhanding his son across the face so hard the signet ring on his middle finger snagged on his cheek. A thin red line dripped down and still he said nothing.

“Stop it!” Nerdanel screamed, and suddenly Feanaro felt himself fly up and slam flat against the stone wall, Tyelko’s hand on his throat pressing tight enough to make him see stars. 

“I could kill you,” he said, flashing white teeth in a cold, wide smile. “If I wanted to. And take your stupid Silmarils.” He spat out the word like it was poison. “Then would you care if I was gone?” 

Tyelko was so much stronger than him now, holding him up with one hand like it was nothing. Feanaro was completely at his mercy, and real panic spiked in him as he scrabbled at the hand on his throat. “You wouldn’t dare,” he rasped. 

“No,” Tyelko said, and unclenched his hand. Feanaro crumpled to the ground in a heap. “I wouldn’t bother.” He was turning away, towards the open door, whistling with two gapped fingers for Huan. Telperion hung low over the horizon. Feanaro squinted and saw the glowing silhouette of a stranger. 


	3. 3

Nerdanel stayed just long enough after the birth of her final sons to give them a single name: Ambarussa, for their flame-red hair so like her own. She left more quietly than Tyelko ever had, beside Feanaro in bed one night, gone when he rolled over in the morning. He knew she, wherever she was, still sent letters to each of her sons, but nothing ever came for him. They, who had shared so many years of marriage, never spoke again. 

Feanaro was sad to let her go, but he reminded himself that her departure was no fault of his own. She had made her choice, and besides, he still had his sons and his Silmarils. He turned most of his affection over to his favorite, Curvo, admiring the ethereal gleam of the gems in his ink-dark hair as he helped him hoist a hammer over his shoulder, bringing it down in an arc to make sparks fly. 

Tyelkormo he seldom spoke to after that fateful evening in the garden, but something was different, regardless, in the way his third son carried himself now. His new deference almost reminded Feanaro of Nelyo’s eternal quest for validation, except that he showed his devotion in gifts of service, the only way he knew how. The logs by the fireplace magically chopped themselves. Fresh game swung from the rafters, plucked and skinned and salted, every other morning. And he kept out of the way-- out of sight, out of mind-- till long past dusk each night, and slept outside with Huan in a pile of hay instead of tracking mud into the house. 

“He goes to see Irisse sometimes,” said Curvo in his small clear voice, clever eyes shining in the way that meant he knew exactly what Feanaro was thinking, and how to answer it as well. “But mostly he just wanders around. He says he doesn’t like to sit inside.” 

“I wonder,” Feanaro said, with the fondness he reserved only for his namesake, “how you know such things about everyone, Curufinwe.” 

“It’s ‘cause I asked,” Curvo said solemnly, “and he told me. People usually do that when you listen.”

…

Dreams began to plague Feanaro’s restless sleep. He tossed and turned alone in the bed he had once shared with his wife, pallid and beaded with perspiration, and twitched in agony when, behind his eyelids, a shadowed hand plunged down and snatched the Silmarils from his brow. 

The rush of relief that flooded him in the morning when he awoke, clawing frantically at his head, and felt the gems’ soothing smoothness against his fingers, was stronger than any drug. 

Feanaro began to plan, and to spend more hours in the forge, crafting something new out of the strongest iron he had. An opaque safe, inaccessible to all save the one who held the key. It pained him to put his precious Silmarils inside, locking their light up in impenetrable darkness, but his fingers twitched with a restlessness that seemed sourceless, an itch to hide, to hoard, to  _ protect  _ that he could no longer ignore. 

The dreams told him the key would not be safe on his own person. He saw a blood-slicked sword protruding from his chest, iron fist snapping the chain and yanking it from his neck, and felt the gaping wound like it was real when he jolted awake in the shadows, breathing hard. So he gave it to the one he trusted most: his father, on a thick silver cord that would not break if cut by steel, and told him in the dead of night to guard it with his life. 

“All right,” said Finwe, though the grim lines on his face betrayed less than pleasure with the bequest. “I’ll keep it for you. Now go home, son. You look like you haven’t slept in a month.” 

More than that, Feanaro thought dully, aching already from withdrawal as the iron box was taken away from him, like a piece of his soul was locked in the darkness inside. 

He knew his sons would do anything for him, if he asked. Somehow, the thought offered him little comfort.

…

The Ambarussa grew quickly, inseparable and identical down to the last freckle on their mirrored faces as they learned to scramble after their brothers, skinny little-boy legs with scraped knees tangling in sync. They spoke their first words on the same day. “Ambarussa,” said one; “Ambarussa!” agreed the other-- a big word for such small mouths, but a shared one, a sacred one-- and it was years before Feanaro finally got around to giving them names of their own. 

“Amrod,” he decided, pointing at the twin on the left. He scrunched up his small face, tasting the strange new word on his tongue. “And Amras.” 

The twin on the right was the first to smile. “We still sound the same.”

They ran off in tandem, two streaks of the same flame. Feanaro’s head suddenly hurt. He touched his forehead, found it absent of the cooling stones on his brow, and suddenly felt like smashing something. 

The screen door swung open and Tyelkormo glanced inside, Huan nosing at the doormat. “Atar, I made something for y--” 

He saw the look on Feanaro’s face and stopped abruptly. Tossing something onto the counter with a clatter, he turned on his heel and vanished. It was a short, serrated knife with a rough wooden handle. 

Feanaro picked up the offering gingerly, with two fingers, and dropped it carefully into a drawer. It seemed the type of thing to give splinters. 

…

Curufinwe’s wedding day was the happiest of Feanaro’s life. Eras later, after all was said and done, he’d struggle to remember the name of the brown-haired woman at his side. But now, he gleamed with pride for his favorite son and savored the smug looks he slid at his half-brothers when their eyes darted his way. 

When Curvo’s son was born, Feanaro shed tears of joy, viscerally reminded of how Curvo himself had looked as a baby. So beautiful and sharp and glowing-bright, almost as flawlessly crafted as his Silmarils. Tyelperinquar, they named him. Silver-fist. 

Tyelko wasn’t at the naming ceremony. Feanaro had to admit he didn’t particularly care. 

…

Kano and Curvo’s raised voices echoed around the small room like bouncing, pricking darts. “You spend too much time writing songs,” Curufinwe snapped. “Can’t you see Atar needs our help?”

“Oh, I’m sure  _ you’d  _ know,” Kano retorted, “since all  _ you  _ do is trail after him. What right do you have to order me around?”

“Do not speak that way to your brother, Macalaure Kanafinwe,” Feanaro roared, and Kano closed his mouth immediately. “Apologize.” 

“Of course you take his side,” he muttered softly. 

“ _ You dare challenge me?”  _ Feanaro saw red. “ _ I am your father!”  _

Kano was silent for several seconds, as if holding his breath. Finally he let it out in a slow exhale. “No. I’m sorry, Atar. You’re right.” 

“And don’t you forget it,” Feanaro said through clenched teeth. He was done with this conversation, done with this family, done with the hole in his heart the Silmarils were burning, miles away in their chest of darkness. He turned sharply and pushed open the door so hard the brass knob cracked against the wall. Curvo followed, imitating the righteous tilt of his chin. 

“Kiss-ass,” someone muttered. 

Feanaro pulled back his fist, not even bothering to break his stride, and knocked Moryo to the floor in a tangle of limbs. Curvo barely spared his brother a scornful glance. 

…

The window over Tyelkormo’s bed, unslept-in in years, was ajar, but the thick, twisted branches of the tree overhead were invisible to anyone not willing to lean halfway over the sill and twist their neck up at a painful angle. 

The sky was dark despite the June heat, clouds broiling with the hint of a storm. Wind whipped through the rustling leaves and stirred the pale hair of the figure leaning against the trunk, head down. The wetness on his face gleamed. He snapped a twig in his hands and it resonated like the crack of a bone. 

…

Feanaro sat bolt upright in bed. A scream rent the air and, disconnected from his body as he was, he barely recognized it as his own.

“They are gone,” he whispered, and touched the place on his chest that felt split wide open, as if a hand had reached inside and carved them out, glossy with his blood. He screamed again, raw and ragged, the scream of a man being devoured alive, and leapt out of bed as if the sheets had burned him. 

Footsteps clattered on the stairs outside. Nelyo was the first to appear at the door. “Atar?” he gasped, eyes wide. 

“The Silmarils,” Feanaro said hoarsely, crumpling. His eldest son caught him in his arms, ever devoted, true worry etched on his pale face. “Gone.” A new realization, a new slash in his gutted body, cut through him. “Finwe is dead.”

His other sons clustered around him, fear and pain flickering like candlelight in their shadowed eyes. Kano, Moryo, Tyelko, shell-shocked and silent. Ambarussa, hair mussed from sleep, clung to each other and shivered. Curvo dropped to his knees and sobbed once, brokenly, not for the loss of his grandfather or the gems but at the sight of the agony on his father’s face, so nearly a mirror of his own. 

The sky outside the parted curtain was black as velvet. No stars gleamed in the dull expanse. “Why’s it so dark?” whispered one of the twins. 

Kanafinwe’s eyes were closed. “The trees. Their light is gone.” 

Feanaro struggled to his feet, nails digging into Nelyo’s shoulder, and groped, clawing, for the nearest face in the dark. “You,” he gasped. “Ride for help. Rouse everyone you can. Nolofinwe, Arafinwe, your cousins--  _ anyone _ . Do you hear me?”

Tyelko’s face was white as a sheet. As the instructions set in, though, it brightened, pale eyes shining sharp, so horribly clashing with the knife-twist in Feanaro’s gut that he curled his fingers and longed to gouge them out.

“Yes, Atar,” he said, almost laughing, and it was a chilling sound. The sound of a person who had never been wanted being granted his basest wish. Finally,  _ finally,  _ he was needed. “Anything for you.” 


	4. 4

“What do you  _ mean  _ you’ll do nothing?” Feanaro screamed. “My life’s work, stolen; my father slain… and you sit there on your thrones and say there is  _ nothing you can do?”  _

He had no fear, no caution, nothing but fire inside of him. The Valar watched him with stony countenances. If they wanted to smite him into ash, if they wanted to throw him into a cell to rot… well, they could fucking go right ahead, Feanaro thought furiously, because nothing could be worse than _this_. Why was he even alive anymore? Why did he have a voice to scream hoarse, fists to shake, veins to flood him with throbbing, boiling blood, when his soul, his heart, his precious Silmarils were _gone_? 

“You are pathetic excuses for gods, all of you,” he spat, venom dripping from his words, and still he choked them out with no abandon. Why should he hold back when everything he was saying was true? “What makes you so much better than us? You’re cowards, and flukes, and you don’t give a fuck about what happens to the universe you were given. You make me sick.”

The Valar’s faces were beginning to contort, eyes flashing as the offensive words sunk in. Good, Feanaro thought; let them hurt like he was hurting. 

“If you won’t help me, I’ll get the Silmarils back myself,” he screamed, throwing all the lungpower he had left into his voice so tears stung at the corners of his eyes, throat scraping raw and bloody. “I’ll get them back or die trying! May the Void claim me if I fail!” He let the finality of that statement sink in for a moment, then lobbed his final blow. “And the sons of Feanaro will pledge the same oath, or may they leave my home and my heart forever!” 

Barely a second of stunned silence stretched out before Curvo stepped forward. “May the Void claim me if I fail to retrieve the Silmarils!” he echoed, unsheathing the small dagger at his hip. Even through his red-hot haze, Feanaro swelled with pride. 

“Curvo, what-- what about your  _ wife?”  _ Kano whispered. “What about Tyelpe? You can’t just--” But no one was listening. 

Nelyo was next, dragging the Ambarussa forward with him, hands on their narrow shoulders. “May the Void claim me if I fail,” he said, worry glinting in his eyes as he looked, as ever, to his father for approval. 

Feanaro’s attention had already moved to the next in line. Would his sons stand by him, or would they crumble? No matter. If any dared to object, he would crush them till their bones glittered like sand, glass and marrow and fragments of spattered crimson. And he had no doubt he could do it, too, with the barest crumple of his hands, because the fire inside him was licking higher, at his skull, in every filament of muscle, and he was infallible, relentless. 

The twins said their part in unison, trembling. Moryo and Kano’s eyes bounced around the vast hall like flashlight beams, searching each face for instructions that were not there. 

Tyelkormo smiled, an anomaly in the sea of pale, grim solemnity. “May the Void claim me if I fail,” he said, like a challenge, a dare. May the Void claim him,  _ if  _ it could. His eyes were sharp, pinned on Feanaro like pinpricks of ice, and Feanaro felt suddenly like a deer staring down the rod of a silver arrow. He looked away quickly. 

“May the Void claim me if I fail,” Moryo said in a rush, so as not to be last. Only Kanafinwe was left now. He looked lost, and spoke only when Feanaro curled his fingers around the hilt of his sword. 

“May the Void claim me.” As melancholic as if it already had.

“It is done,” Feanaro said harshly, turning back to the Valar on their thrones. He did not hear the curse Manwe breathed in his direction, nor see the tendrils of it twining smoke-soft around his ankles and the waists of his sons. He saw only fire behind his eyes. 

_ May Eru doom you and your quest.  _

_ … _

“What the fuck was that?” Moryo erupted the second they were outside in the inky, starless eternal-dark. The Valar’s halls loomed behind him like a skeleton, a refuge they were no longer welcome in. “You do realize that if we fail, we’ll all be trapped in the Void forever?” 

Kano looked down at his feet. 

“Shut  _ up,  _ Moryo,” Curvo said acidly. “How dare you blaspheme the will of our father? It had to be done, and so we will do it. And  _ I  _ would gladly surrender my life if I let Atar down.” He glittered with pride. It wasn’t a real vow, just a truism: because of course none of them were  _ really  _ going to die.

Tyelko laughed. Shock, then offense, flashed in Curvo’s dark eyes, but instead of falling silent at the look, he tipped his silver head back and laughed louder, fists clenched at his sides. It was the laugh of a madman, a hyena, peals and peals of wild hysterics aimed at the black sky. 

His eyes were as empty as the Void when he straightened up at last. Tears of mirth, or something else, dotted his pale cheeks. Curvo took a hasty step backwards, as if expecting Tyelko to lunge at him like an animal. 

“Wouldn’t we all,” he said, and his smile was the frozen snarl of a shot beast, a gruesome trophy nailed on the wall. “Wouldn’t we all.” 

…

Feanaro had always loathed his half-brothers. Now the fire that filled the empty hollow in his chest danced, smarting, on his tongue, and every sentence that escaped his mouth was hot. He gleaned a sadistic jolt of satisfaction every time Nolofinwe or Arafinwe or one of their pathetic spawn cringed backwards when he snapped. Let them cower. Let them respect him at last for what he was: their superior, the forger of the Silmarils, the one  _ true  _ heir of Finwe. 

“I am telling you to trust me because that is the logical thing to do,” he growled now, slamming his fist down on the table with a thud that did not erase the urge to take hold of one of Nolofinwe’s idiotic, goggling children and crush their windpipe in his bare hands. “ _ What _ do you not understand about this plan? My sons and I will sail across first and you will follow when the boats return to you. Truly, if the concept of taking turns fails to penetrate your thick skulls, I marvel at the simplemindedness of your--”

Nolofinwe’s eldest son-- the one with gold thread woven into his braids-- made an almost involuntary movement, as if about to spring forward. Nelyo seized him by the shoulders and pulled him back. Nobody, Feanaro least of all, noticed the tenderness with which he released the other, murmuring something inaudible into his ear. 

“The problem is not the plan but the fact that this isn’t what we initially discussed, and you know it,” Nolofinwe snapped. “You know damn well there was no talk of  _ taking turns  _ when your son pulled us out of bed in the middle of the night and told us you’ve gotten your entire line cursed by the Valar.”

“Cursed?” Feanaro rounded on Tyelkormo.  _ “Cursed?  _ You lying, insolent-- there was no  _ curse-- _ ” 

“I’m not  _ lying _ !” Tyelko exploded, and for a second he was an elfling again, shouting at Feanaro over the dinner table with a fork in his hand. Only now he was a foot taller than Feanaro and brandishing not a fork, but a glinting sword. “Forsaking the Valar’s aid is a curse in its own right. And why can’t all of us sail across at the same time? We need more than eight people to man the ships.” 

“Because,” Feanaro hissed, “this is  _ our  _ quest, not theirs, and any son of Feanaro who chooses to support my half-brothers and their spawn over their own father is no son to me. We will allow them to sail with us,” he spat, lying through his teeth, “but do not dare challenge my authority again. This conversation is over.” 

Nolofinwe, who had been about to say something scathing, slowly closed his mouth. Idiot, Feanaro thought maliciously. Of course he hadn’t been serious; he had only lost his patience and wished to cut off the debate. Whichever group reached the boats last-- and Feanaro knew it would not be him-- would be at the mercy of those already on board, and he had no intention of granting any. 

A slamming door shattered the shocked silence. Tyelkormo was gone, the end of Huan’s tail disappearing around the doorway and into the black night. 

A beat. “Where is Irisse?” Nolofinwe roared. 

…

“Nowhere,” he said in the morning-- if it could be called that, for the sky was still black as ink. “I was nowhere.” 

“You had better not be  _ nowhere  _ when we board the boats,” Feanaro said stiffly. 

“Yes, Atar.” 

Tyelko was better than his word. He was the first to loose an arrow when Feanaro gave the command. 

He looked back only once, pale eyes boring straight into his father’s skull, cheeks and forehead slicked with blood. Feanaro thought he seemed in his element with crimson flashing on his sword, moving in the ways he’d been taught in the forest, better and more fluid than everyone else, and it scared him a little. Because what, really, was off-limits to a hunter? Who decided where to draw the line between sport and massacre? 

Feanaro saw Kano cry out in horror when a Teleri woman went limp in his hands, saw Nelyo swinging his sword with tears in his eyes, saw the Ambarussa running with blood-slicked hands through the fray, crying for their mother. Even he felt slightly sick as he drove his blade through the chest of the very last victim and saw him crumple, legs buckling like rotten wood.

Tyelko did not break as he cut through skin and sinew, blood and guts dripping from the point of his sword. His face was empty, almost calm, as if this really was nothing more than a hunt, the practiced notch and swish of an arrow as it flew, meeting its target in the breast of a young man whose white shirt bloomed with red. He said nothing at all as he and his brothers filed onto the deck of their hard-won ship, eyes dull and shuttered as the lightless sky, until Feanaro cut through the rope tying the boat to its dock and shoved it out from shore. 

Only then did he cry “Wait! Wait-- stop,  _ stop! _ ” as his cousins, blood-spattered and dazed, rushed up to their knees in the foaming spray moments too late, grabbing at the severed rope and missing, screaming  _ come back, wait, damn you, bastards!;  _ when Irisse tore at her waterlogged skirts and fought the crashing waves with her fists, tears cutting wavy lines through the blood smeared on her cheeks. 

_ You’re my only friend, Irisse.  _

He wedged one foot into the wooden rail and grabbed wildly at the rigging, but Curvo jumped on his back, pinning his arms to his side, and they fell together onto the deck with a crash. They wrestled, but by the time Tyelko threw his brother off of him, the boat was no longer gliding smoothly in mirrored waters. These waves were stronger, churning, rolling as they slammed into the boat’s sleek sides. They had breached the bay. Swimming back from here would be impossible. 

Only then did Tyelko lean over the rail, bending at the waist as if stabbed, and scream. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if a few lines in this chapter sound vaguely familiar to you, that's because i published a fic awhile back (it's called 'i wasn't thinking about you;' you can find it on my profile) with all of the celegorm/aredhel "deleted scenes" from this fic!


	5. 5

The boat rocked from side to side, tossed by the relentless tide. Clouds slipped over the black sky and shaded it dull grey. Thirteen hands clutched the rail in a death grip, knuckles shining bone-white. The fourteenth was curled into thick grey-brown fur. 

Tyelperinquar screamed, small face bright red. Curvo’s wife had stayed behind, already fading into irrelevance in Feanaro’s mind. Miles and miles and miles stretched on before them, unseen, unknown. 

Tyelko was off the boat before the bow slid into the ragged, rocky coast of the new world, boots sloshing through the shallow water. Salty droplets sprayed everywhere as he kicked and stumbled his way onto the stones, slip-sliding over mist-slicked pebbles and into the craggy, dark wood. Huan bounded after him. 

Feanaro clenched his jaw around a snarl of frustration. “Curvo,” he said tersely, “tie the boats together and leave them unanchored. Ensure no one is left inside.” 

“Why--” Moryo started. 

_ “No one,”  _ Feanaro bit out. “Understand?” 

“Yes, Atar,” Curvo said, dark eyes shiny, an almost holy glow of devotion lighting them up. Tyelpe wailed like a siren, like he could sense the black roots of this new land. 

Feanaro bent and scraped a jagged stick from the slick ground. He snapped a tiny piece off the end and it made a satisfying crack. Dry. More faded driftwood littered the stony ground, crunching with the pebbles under their feet. “Moryo,” he demanded. “Gather as many of these as you can carry. Kanafinwe, get up. Be half a  _ ner _ for once in your life and pull yourself together.” 

Pallid and wan, Kano picked himself up off the glossy stones and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. A piece of limp seaweed clung, fronded, to his wet dark hair. He looked like he’d been spit out by the tide instead of having just finished heaving remnants of it out of him. His hands shook as he stooped to collect the nearest scrap of driftwood. 

Footsteps crackled over the pebbled ground. Curvo had one of the Ambarussa by the arm and was dragging him, frozen and blank-eyed, out of the hull of the nearest wooden boat. His twin, identically shaken, stood on the tip of a dripping, jutting rock at the edge of the sloshing waves. “Amrod,  _ really…  _ Atar said no one was to linger on board. You could have been--” 

Feanaro struck the match with a vicious scrape. The streak of red-orange flame gleamed like lightning in his eyes. The stick, held aloft in a clenched fist still scraped with half-healed cuts from the frenzied flails of his defenseless kin, soared in a neat arc over the inky waves and dropped noiselessly onto the deck. Fire bloomed instantly, golden flickers opening up like petals, on the wooden hull. 

Curvo threw his torch and more flames burst into flower, creeping up the white sail and blackening it to a crisp. Face crumpling slow like burning paper, Nelyo swallowed hard and turned away, hiding the tears welling fast in his eyes. 

A dull crash sounded behind Feanaro, and then a strangled shout. “No!” Tyelko stumbled out of the thorny brush. “You _lied!_ I thought-- I thought--” 

“You thought what?” Kano’s smile was sad, even as he raised his flaming stick high. “We were still going to  _ take turns?”  _

Smoke billowed up into the ever-dark sky, curling in soft grey tendrils. A thousand miles across the mirrored sea, screams of renewed fury tore through the silence. Scraped knees dropped onto gritty sand and the remnants of a blood-spattered white skirt floated up as if lifted by a current. 

Tyelko snatched the torch out of Kano’s hands and threw it into the blazing skeleton of the boat so hard it snuffed out in midair. Huan howled. 

…

The pitted, dry ground was no ideal bed. Feanaro lay stiffly on his side over a thin blanket and stared at the tarp inches from his face with glazed eyes. An amber glow shone through the side of his tent from the still-lit fire outside. Shadows, sharp-edged and distinct, stretched over the canvas, and voices floated in over the dull hum of a million invisible crickets overhead. 

“…know you’re upset about Irisse.” The smooth whisper, nearly identical in pitch to Feanaro’s own, was evidently intended to be calming. 

“What do  _ you _ know about that?” Tyelkormo’s voice was much louder, despite the late hour. Feanaro wished, as he had so many countless times before, that he would keep it down for once in his life. 

The shadows shifted, moving. A hand melted into a shoulder. “You’re not exactly subtle, are you? I still have bruises from trying to pull you off the rail.” 

“Don’t lecture me about subtlety. You were perfectly happy to leave them behind, weren’t you? You  _ knew.”  _

“About the burning? I didn’t--”

“Don’t  _ lie!”  _ The bigger shadow shoved the other, which rippled against the tarp as it stumbled. 

Curvo righted himself quickly. “I’m only trying to help _ ,”  _ he said coldly. “But I will not stand here and listen to you calling Atar a liar.” 

Feanaro was listening intently now. The shadow that was Tyelko stabbed a stick viciously into the place where the amber glow was brightest, and he heard sparks crackle on the other side of the tent. “I don’t need your help.” 

Silence. Crickets droned overhead. “Come riding with me tomorrow.” 

More silence. Feanaro, lying still as the shadows outside his tent shifted and flickered, understood that this was a trade, an ultimatum. Curvo was reeling his brother in, bringing him over to Feanaro’s side in exchange for companionship, because-- and Feanaro cursed himself for not thinking of this sooner-- Tyelko would give,  _ did  _ give, complete, blind devotion to whoever made him feel wanted. 

A boot scuffed against dry grass. “Fine.” 

Victory. 

…

Dawn rose sharp and cold over the barren trees, but there was a glitter in the biting air, like an invisible cord pulled taut. Anticipation hung over the windless clearing. 

Feanaro felt more alive than he had since the theft of the Silmarils, even as the chill stung his flinty eyes and the sharp hollows of his cheekbones. Alive in the way a sleepless night pulled back the corners of the world and revealed blurred shadows in the groggy darkness. His gems called to him; they tugged at the space in his chest that would ordinarily contain a heart. They were near. Just a few miles further through this ugly, jagged forest. He could envision them in his hands so vividly he almost felt their smooth coolness in his palm, and the thought filled him with something that burned and seared, alive in the way a flame danced, in the way a stone teetered at the edge of a precipice. 

His sons seemed more alive too, in their own ways, except for Kano whose pale face was shadowed like a corpse’s when the Ambarussa dragged him out of his tent. The excitement was palpable as they rode out of the clearing. Curvo gleamed; Tyelko fidgeted; Nelyo’s spine was ramrod straight, reins clenched tight in white-knuckled hands. Feanaro’s black stallion reared its glossy head as a beam of sharp silvery light stretched through the trees, illuminating its rider’s polished armor. 

He smiled sharply and felt invincible, like a ruler in his own right, like more of a god than any of the Valar. 

… 

“It’s impenetrable. There’s no way in.”

Nelyo’s voice was hushed, laced with so much fear it sounded reverent. Feanaro wanted to slap the ridiculous awe right out of his heir’s mouth. “Listen to me,” he said through clenched teeth, “and we  _ will _ find our way in. If you are not confident in my leadership abilities, Nelyafinwe, then you may escort yourself back to the camp.” 

Nelyo’s face fell. “Of-- of course not, Atar-- I only meant--” 

“I have no time to listen to sniveling apologies,” Feanaro cut in, waving a hand to silence him. “Follow close or stay behind.” 

He yanked his reins left, wheeling his horse around in a tight circle, and kicked it sharply in the sides. The clipped rush of hooves echoed on the slick stone behind him, but he did not glance back to count heads. He knew none of his sons had the gall to defy him. 

The mountain pass was narrow, framed on either side with dark, rough spikes as if the rocks had been cleft apart, hastily and sloppily, with a giant axe. The deeper they went, the colder it got, and the slimier. A dank sourness permeated the air. It smelled like evil. No one spoke, no one moved, and no sound save the steady patter of hooves, like hard rain drumming on a tin roof, broke the unnerving silence. 

Huan padded swiftly beside Tyelko’s horse, ears pricked. Feanaro glared at the back of his shaggy head. Why had he insisted on following his master here? A dog, no matter how intelligent, was nothing but a liability in battle. Feanaro knew the wretched creature distrusted him anyway. The way he looked at him sometimes, with that uncanny reproach on his canine face-- like every dark fragment of Feanaro’s soul was visible to his beady dog-eyes, and he was bold enough to scorn it, to  _ look down  _ on it… 

If Feanaro had had his way, he would have left the beast behind in Valinor. No  _ animal,  _ especially one of the Valar’s, should have the right to look at him as if  _ it  _ had the moral high ground. Why Huan followed Tyelko, of all people, that good-for-nothing sword-swinger with a temper bigger than his brain-- 

“Atar!” 

Feanaro didn’t even know which of his sons had screamed before his horse was rearing up. He flew backwards and hit the slimy black wall in a heap. Scrambling to his feet, yanking his sword out of its scabbard, he looked around for the threat, electric ire spiking in him at being caught off guard. 

A head spiraled through the air and splatted, dripping blood the color of ink, on the slick ground. Feanaro’s stomach dropped. It wasn’t an elf, wasn’t even an animal, but some horrible grey-brown mud-slicked  _ thing  _ with bulging yellow eyes and pointed, filthy teeth and a twisted, bubbling face. Tyelko’s sword was slicked with black. 

A dull, distant roar slowly filled Feanaro’s ears, and the ground beneath him seemed to rumble. For a moment, he thought his head was still ringing from the impact. Then he noticed that his sons’ heads, even the horses’ heads, were all swiveling in the direction of the sound. 

“We’re trapped,” Moryo said shakily. And then the stone wall to their right exploded in a mess of dark, glistening shards, like glass shattering. Hordes of horrible, mutated creatures, fanged and clawed and clutching crude iron weapons, burst through the opening, snarling in an incomprehensible guttural language. 

Tyelko lifted his bloodstained sword higher. 

…

“This place is cursed.” Kano stumbled backwards, eyes wide, dark irises cracked. “We have to get out of h--” 

“ _ There is no going back now!”  _ Feanaro barely recognized the voice that came out of his mouth, a bared, harsh snarl as discordant as the speech of the creatures that lay slain around them in heaps. “What would you have us do, Kanafinwe? Turn back when we are so close to the Silmarils?” He could feel them glowing close, humming and drawing him in, and their glittering pull was driving him slightly mad, like an itch just beneath the skin.

Tyelko let the final body slip out of his hands, slick with black blood. It thudded to the stone floor face-up, hideous mouth still twisted in a grinning leer. He yanked his sword out of its gut. “Then let’s go. I’m sick of standing around.” Huan’s muzzle and paws were stained black from the fight too, but he edged away from the corpse as if the foul thing reeked of poison.

One of the Ambarussa opened his mouth to protest, eyeing the steaming bodies strewn on the floor. Tyelkormo cut him off, jabbing his sword at the entrance to a cave that glittered with black crystals. “We did what we had to. If we stay here any longer, we’ll be killed. Let’s get it over with!” 

More like  _ you  _ did what you had to, Feanaro thought, feeling a chill prickle up his spine as he eyed the black blood dripping in rivulets down his third son’s hands, dying the hem of his coat dark as ink. Tyelko had slaughtered at least two-thirds of the creatures on his own, without even waiting for Feanaro to give the order. 

Tyelko turned around and made as if to stride through the crystal-lined gap. “Stop,” Feanaro barked, and he froze, bloody hands clenching at his sides. “ _ I  _ am the leader of this quest.” 

They did not look at each other as Feanaro pushed his way to the front, but Tyelkormo waited, black blood dripping sluggishly off the tip of his lowered sword, and moved sideways into the shadows with a sort of deference in his pale eyes, behind their almost feral emptiness. Curvo stood with him, admiration gleaming in the dark eyes identical to Feanaro’s own. They made a good team despite the contrast, Feanaro thought: two loyal weapons waiting on the sidelines, one a cunning plan, the other a crushing fist. Tools he could use in the future, once he had his gems back. 

The Silmarils’ energy was stronger here, so magnetic Feanaro found his steps quickening to a run. Doing anything but closing the gap was unthinkable. He saw the jewels in his mind so clearly they floated in his vision, almost tangible,  _ calling  _ for him to take them back. The cave walls blurred on either side of him. So close-- if he could just stretch out a hand and grasp--

Screams erupted behind him. Red fire obscured Feanaro’s eyes, and he stumbled. The Silmarils vanished behind the flames, and when they died down in licking curls and dark smoke wafted up to the ceiling of the cave, a monstrous black-scaled figure slipped through the sooty sheen like a curtain. Its eyes glowed with a flame so bright it was nearly white, and it shot out a thin curling tongue, diamond-sharp in the shadows. 

Feanaro’s fingers buzzed with new energy as he closed them tight around the hilt of his sword. All he saw in the blinding flash of the fire-monster’s eyes were his precious Silmarils waiting for him, calling for him. And he would come. 

His body moved for him, fluid as a dance. They fought, sparks flying as his blade clashed against the gleaming curve of one massive claw. The monster moved effortlessly, almost lazily: it was born to fight, a machination of embers and armored plates, but Feanaro raged against its confidence with equal power, because he was made for this moment as well. He fought for his Silmarils as one would fight for love, for life, for legacy. And he screamed, louder and more horrible even than the smoky, coiling snarls that issued from his adversary’s gaping mouth, “ _ Back off! They are MINE!”  _

The creature flicked an onyx hand, and Feanaro smashed to the gritty cave floor so hard his eyes rattled like marbles in his skull. One of the Ambarussa cried out from what seemed like a thousand miles away. He hauled himself to his feet and cut at the air with his sword so viciously a rivulet of blood slid down the leg of the monster, red-gold and lit like lava. 

Feanaro regretted bringing his sons here. This was  _ his  _ fight,  _ his  _ demon,  _ his  _ glory to chase. He felt, with an odd shard of bitterness lodged in his throat, that they were intruding on something private, even intimate-- standing shocked in the background, goggling uselessly at him as he struggled for  _ his  _ gems,  _ his  _ life. He wished he could slam a door on them and do this truly alone. 

“Someone  _ help him!”  _ That was Nelyo. Feanaro gritted his teeth as he dodged a burst of fire from the monster’s mouth. Couldn’t they see he didn’t  _ want  _ their help?

An arrow flew up and lodged itself in a massive black-scaled shoulder, useless as a bee sting. Behind Feanaro, Kano lifted his voice in song, but the notes sounded tinny and desperate, fingers trembling on the strings, and the music’s magic was weak and faltering. 

Feanaro heard footsteps behind him and whirled around, slashing brutally at empty air. A silver blade, stained black, flew up in self-defense, and Feanaro saw red. 

“ _ Get out of my way!”  _ he roared, and turned on Tyelko with the same vicious energy that had been directed at the beast. The Silmarils, glowing so near, hummed in approval. They wanted him to cut down anyone who stood between him and them, and Feanaro, mindless with white flame and hollowness and rage, agreed. His sword came down in a blur, and brilliant red slicked its blade. Tyelko fell backwards with a hard crack. 

Feanaro smiled skeletally. 

Kano screamed. 

A searing cut lashed through him, and his legs buckled. He crumpled to the ground, black spots in his vision, and the victorious monster raised its armored fist and brought down the flaming whip six more times on his prone body. Feanaro’s eyes shuttered between black and white as it stomped away, sliding back into the cloud of smoke and vanishing. 

“The-- Silmarils,” he coughed, tasting iron in his mouth. 

His son’s faces swam in his vision. They clustered around him like they’d done the night his gems were stolen, Curvo dragging a limping Tyelko with blood streaking his silver hair. Moryo was shaking his head. 

“Atar,” Curvo gasped, like the wind had been knocked out of him. 

Kano was crying. The tears on his face, glistening gray as they mingled with the still-fresh black blood smeared on his cheeks, were the last thing Feanaro saw before the sight left his eyes. He’d always assumed that everything went black before one died, but the color that roared to life all around him was brightest red. Every inch of his body screamed, or perhaps that was his sons, crying out in horror. 

Feanaro’s soul left his body when it was nothing but a heap of ash on the stone floor. He floated up, up, through the cave roof and over the stars, which winked cruelly at him like thousands of narrowed, slitted eyes. Then, at last, everything went black.


	6. 6

It took Feanaro several minutes to understand where he was. 

The realization that this was the Void should not have surprised him: after all, he was the one who had pledged his soul to it should he fail to reclaim the Silmarils. But it did, a little. Or, at least, the appearance of it. He’d always imagined the Void to be full of fire and brimstone and the screams of tortured  _ feas _ . This… this was just nothing.

Feanaro blinked his newly formed eyes and examined his pale new hands, finding the fingers thin and skeletal in the absence of light in this place where he floated. No floor, no ceiling, no walls, just a silent black vacuum that stretched out forever. 

He moved his new arms and legs experimentally, testing the joints’ flexibility, and found that if he scooped armfuls of air and kicked froglike with his legs, he could swim sluggishly through the suspended darkness. There was no point in trying to go anywhere, though, so he quickly stopped. There was a strange complacent numbness creeping through his body like venom, stilling his heartbeat and dulling all sensation so that he found caring about anything-- even the Silmarils-- was beyond him.

Something glowed to life in the distance. A square of light, still and mirrored like calm water. Feanaro squinted at it for a second, then moved his numb limbs and forced himself to mechanically swim toward it. He felt so heavy, leaden and dull inside, that he wondered how he was still floating and not plunging down into whatever lay below this darkness. 

The light seemed incorporeal, like a projection. Feanaro stuck a hand into it and watched it pass right through to the other side. It rippled outward like a disturbed pond, and shifted. Colors blurred to life, swirled and mixed. Grey and green and shadowy black, and a hint of silver. He would have been astonished if not for the numbness that made him merely stare blankly as a scene, moving in all the intricacies of reality, flickered into existence. 

Curvo was talking to Tyelko under the shadowed hang of some dark, needled tree, dried tears shining on his face. Their voices were as clear as if Feanaro was standing right beside them, but it was obvious they could neither hear nor see him. 

“…how we can go on,” Curvo was saying, in a small choked voice that seemed to fold in on itself. “We still have to get the Silmarils back, but without Atar--”

Tyelko’s arms were folded over his chest. A thin red line, starting at his jaw and snaking down his neck and right shoulder, disappeared under his collar. Feanaro realized, with as much shock as the numbness would allow him, that  _ he  _ had given him that mark. “We still have a leader. Nelyo is king of the Noldor now.” 

“Nelyo isn’t--”

“--Nelyo isn’t Atar. I know. But don’t give up now _.”  _ Tyelko tried hard to smile, but his tone was too flat to be called lighthearted. “We only just got here.” 

“But what am  _ I  _ supposed to do?” Curvo said helplessly. “I don’t-- I should have done more to save him; I--”

Curled up at Tyelko’s feet, Huan suddenly lifted his head, staring straight at Feanaro as if somehow able to see him there, floating in darkness on the other side of the screen. His furry dog-face somehow managed to look uncannily stern. Feanaro felt the back of his neck prickle. 

“You have to just keep moving forward.” Tyelko clapped his brother on the shoulder, perhaps too hard, but Curvo was listening. “It’s like--” He hesitated. “When you shoot a deer. You can’t think back about its… life, or its family, or whatever, once you kill it, or you’ll never be able to skin it. You have to see it only as what it is now. Which is a dead thing that you can use for its fur or meat.”

“That makes no sense, Tyelko,” Curvo said, squinting through his tears. “But thanks. I guess.”

“I never claimed to have a way with words.” Tyelko’s face fell slightly, but he hid it well behind a propped-up smile.

Feanaro didn’t realize until he blinked and a wet tear slid down his face that the reason why his eyes were stinging was because the numbness in his chest had been replaced with a dull ache.

…

But he couldn’t look away. 

“He  _ fought  _ us,” Amras said hollowly, russet head bowed and glinting in the dying embers. His twin was silent beside him, staring down at his hands as if seeing them caked in slick blood still, blood long since scrubbed-off in the stream but still pulsing beneath the skin, irremovable as a heartbeat. The sky was so dark it blended into the corners of Feanaro’s square of light, melting into the blackness of the Void above. “Atar… Atar would have killed us for the Silmarils.” 

“It’s not his fault,” Curvo said, a bit harsher than he’d intended judging by the way he twisted his mouth. Quieter, he continued. “The oath we swore is binding. Atar  _ had  _ to try and reach the Silmarils at all costs, and we got in his way.” 

Moryo looked sullen, or perhaps spooked. It was hard to tell, as all Feanaro could see in the dim firelight was the dark ridge of his furrowed brows. He crushed a dry leaf with his heel. “So now  _ we  _ have to get them back, don’t we?” 

“Yes,” Nelyo said too quickly. “Of course we do. If not for the oath, for Atar. He would have wanted us to finish what he started.”

A spark popped, gunshot-loud. The dead speck of ash floated up into the black sky, disappearing at the invisible line where grim clouds met empty Void. “Clearly,” Tyelko muttered, pale face half-hidden in smoke. “Or he wouldn’t have doomed us, would he?” 

No one said anything then, and floating there in the darkness, Feanaro almost felt something break inside of him, a hairline crack on the dull porcelain casing of his ribcage, at the stunned, watery gleam of Curvo’s downcast eyes. But they hardened, even as he watched, turning to something like dark steel. 

He elbowed his brother hard in the side, and suddenly Tyelko looked like a wounded animal. “Never mind,” he amended. “I mean-- yeah. Let’s, um.” 

Twelve pairs of eyes locked onto his face like so many spotlights, and he froze the way he had when he was a child being quizzed on math facts at the kitchen table. There was only one right answer now, just as there had been then. It was the answer his brothers had come to expect of him, the epithet everyone tacked onto his name, synonymous with strong and hasty-riser. And Tyelkormo bluffed exactly the way he had so many years ago, reading the answer through the sunlit paper in Feanaro’s hands: only now it was written in the grim faces staring at him like he was a deadly, wild thing, a scorpion ready to lash and sting with no warning. Waiting to hear what they expected to hear. 

“Fight,” he said. 

Curvo smiled, a thin line that did not quite reach his eyes. “Yes. Let’s.” 

…

A letter came by messenger at dawn. Feanaro read it over Nelyo’s shoulder, hovering in his dark suspension like a mosquito stuck in sap, unable to tear his eyes off the page. He recognized it for what it was right away. A trick. 

_ Negotiation. Peace. Surrender of a Silmaril.  _ Those words dripped with insincerity, enticing in their clean shininess: offering false hope, baiting his sons with fantasies of a quick finish to the task they were now bound to in his place. 

Nelyo smiled, and Feanaro scowled, not noticing the empty hoods of his oldest son’s eyes. Had they truly been so quick to forget what had happened beneath the mountain not a fortnight ago? The hordes of yellow-eyed creatures, the flame monster with its flicking whip, the way he’d  _ died--  _ and Nelyafinwe chose to believe in  _ peace? _

Feanaro watched Nelyo leave his tent in the dead of night, no note left in his place. He watched him slide a single silver blade into his belt, forsaking any other weapons, and set off through the dark, slick-leaved path still steamy from a recent rain. The crescent moon looked like a narrowed eye in the dark, bloodshot and slitted, passing judgement as harsh and silent as Feanaro’s own. 

He scoffed, and would have turned away so as to ignore the idiocy of his heir. But he found he could not. The soupy substance of the Void pushed, almost magnetically, around him, encasing him in place like a mummy inside a sarcophagus. Feanaro tried to close his eyes and found it was impossible. They were plastered wide open like the painted-on stare of a doll. 

And so he watched. 

…

Rain sprayed inside the tent as the flap was ripped open by a pale, clenched hand. Inside, Kano and Curvo tensed as if expecting an assault, but the hooded figure who shoved inside had tendrils of familiar silver hair plastered all over his face. An equally soaked Huan bounded inside after him.

“What the hell? What’s going on?” Curvo remained seated, but Kano jumped up as if pricked by lightning, gripping the sides of his harp hard enough to crack the veneered wood. 

Tyelko ripped off his hood, spraying them with more cold rain. “Nelyo is gone.” He sounded out of breath, like he’d run here to deliver this news. 

Curvo lifted an eyebrow. Strangely, the cold glance seemed to calm the other down slightly. “And you know this because…” 

“Because he’s not in his tent, and neither is that letter.” 

“He’s been kidnapped,” gasped Kano. His face was so white it looked nearly blue in the dim light. “They must have-- while we were asleep--”

Curvo’s skeptical face quickly morphed into one of horror. 

“No,” said Tyelko. “There’s only one set of footsteps in the mud outside, and they lead into the forest. He went to try and negotiate by himself.”

“You’re  _ joking.”  _

“Do I look like I’m joking?” His eyes glinted an unnatural white, sharper than the rain that drilled down over their heads. 

“So what do we do?” Kano was twisting his pale hands together, over and over in the same tight motion, like wringing out a towel. His voice shook.

Curvo’s smile was the sharpest thing of all. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said, slowly swiveling around until his dark eyes bore into Kano’s skull like blades. “Why don’t you tell us,  _ heir apparent?”  _

Kano’s mouth fell open.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a shorter chapter this time, but a plot-heavy one! finally, the void aspect of this fic is starting to come into play. (though analogies are not tyelko's strong point, apparently sldjksjd)


	7. 7

Feanaro longed to close his eyes. 

The images emblazoned into his retinas stung him, made his dry eyes water. He saw Nelyo kneel at the dark, spiked throne of a shadowy god who flicked a bored hand and strung him up in rusted chains. He saw Nelyo dangling over the edge of a rough cliff face, swinging pathetically in the breeze like a marionette, caught by a thick gold cuff on his right wrist. Saw whips lick at his eldest son’s shoulders and back, cutting red lines into the pale skin, saw him kissed by fire and caressed with knives until blood trickled down from the welts on his striped body, painting the dead grass far below with beads that shone like rubies. 

And, double-layered over the smarting, stinging brand of Nelyo swinging and dripping blood in his vertical prison, Feanaro saw Kano sitting ghost-pale in his tent under the black sky. Doing  _ nothing.  _

Kanafinwe plucked at his harp with bruised fingers, playing songs of mourning and lament. He sent Curvo to the forge to meld swords and shields and Moryo to scout the borders of their pathetic mudpit of a camp. He directed Tyelko and the Ambarussa to chop logs which they stacked into square-shaped cabins, slowly replacing the tents with real roofed structures. And during the pitch-black day he sang slow ballads of regret in the privacy of Nelyo’s-- now his-- room, welcoming few visitors and emerging only to check on his brothers’ progress. 

“What are you doing?” he said now, out at the edge of the clearing, scrubbing a hand over his red-rimmed eyes and holding himself tight. The exhaustion in his voice could have been mistaken, if one was not listening closely, for contempt. 

Tyelko looked up. “What does it look like I’m doing?” 

Kano sighed. “It  _ looks, _ ” he said, “like you’re sitting on a tree stump carving something instead of doing what I asked you to do.” 

“You didn’t ask me to do anything,” Tyelko said, and continued whittling at the chunk of wood in his hands as if Kano was not there. 

Feanaro could see the thin line in the middle of Kano’s forehead, a line carved by enough sleepless nights to indicate that he was wound nearly tight enough, if his brother kept speaking this way, to snap. 

“I asked you to finish salting the venison,” he said quietly. 

“No, you  _ asked  _ me to do nothing,” Tyelko insisted. “ _ Nothing,  _ because that’s what we’re doing. Sitting on our asses playing house when Nelyo is somewhere in that mountain, waiting for a rescue that’s not coming!” 

Kano dropped his gaze. “Tyelkormo, our brother is dead. I’m sorry.” 

“Well, why are we still  _ here,  _ then?” Tyelko jumped up and threw his knife so fast Kano barely had time to flinch. It flashed in the air, glinting silver, and embedded itself in a tree fifteen feet away, hilt quivering with the impact. His teeth flashed sharp when he spoke. “Why aren’t we going after the Silmarils? Why aren’t we avenging Nelyo’s death? What are we  _ doing,  _ King of the Noldor?” 

Kano stumbled backwards as if slapped, flinching like the spat-out words had physically hurt him, and suddenly tears were pooling in his wide, shadowed eyes. “I don’t know!” he said brokenly. “I d-don’t know…” 

Tyelko took a step backwards too. “Wait, I-- I didn’t mean-- don’t cry,” he said quickly. “I’ll go salt the venison or whatever.” 

“N-no, don’t!” Tears were sliding down Kano’s too-pale face. “I don’t-- I need help. I didn’t know I was ever going to be king. I thought-- Nelyo…” 

“Yeah, I know,” Tyelko said, looking slightly frightened. 

Kano dropped down onto the vacated tree stump and dissolved into sobs. “I’m  _ trying _ to do-- do things-- but no one listens to me!” 

Tyelko looked, for a second, like he was going to bolt. Then, decisively, he dropped his half-carved piece of wood into the mud. “I’m listening.” 

Kano lifted his head slowly, looking almost directly at Feanaro. The tears on his face glittered like diamonds. For barely a second, Feanaro thought-- a foolish thought, but a breathless, aching,  _ longing  _ one-- he saw his gems’ light in their smudged sparkle. He reached out a hand, meaning to touch, to stroke one away and feel its wetness on his numb fingers; and the screen rippled and his hand passed right through his son’s face, just as fragile hope bloomed there. 

“Thank you,” Kano whispered, and Feanaro could almost have forgotten Tyelko was there. Could almost have believed he was speaking to  _ him _ through the curtain of the Void.

… 

It wasn’t until much later that Feanaro realized he’d seen Tyelko’s knife before, short and serrated with an unfinished handle. He remembered sweeping it gingerly into a kitchen drawer what felt like several lifetimes ago, thinking  _ it seems the type of thing to give splinters.  _

It seemed Tyelko wanted to give himself splinters now. It seemed he relished the prick, the sting. Like he was trying to make himself feel something with each turn of his wrist as he sawed away at a stubborn rope, making it twist and fray. Fill up his dead heart with fresh blood in a last-ditch effort to get it pumping again. Like shooting adrenaline into a corpse. 

…

Tyelko and Curvo organized a search party. No one said anything about  _ too little, too late,  _ but Feanaro could taste the truth on the tip of each tongue, bitten back for the sake of tact. 

Kano watched them pack the horses, head bowed like the silver coronet on his brow was too heavy for his spine. Feanaro ached at the sight of the three empty pockets in the center that had once held his Silmarils. There was a lump lodged deep in his throat that made it difficult to breathe. He wasn’t sure why it was there, but it hurt him worse than the flames which had turned him to ash. 

It was an especially black morning. The branches, laden with withered leaves, were invisible against the dark sky as they swayed in the wind. Feanaro closed his eyes and saw Nelyo twitch as a gold-toothed whip slid honey-slow up his dripping side, dipped in fire and still sparking. He wished his sons would hurry up. 

Did he have a right to wish that? Was it not his fault Nelyafinwe was in chains? Had  _ he  _ not bound his sons to the oath that had already claimed him? Feanaro didn’t know anything anymore. He tuned into the terse voices of his sons, standing in a small huddle under the spiky leaves. 

“We’re  _ not _ bringing Huan.” Curvo raised his voice slightly when no one responded right away. “Tyelko, come on. I’m not bringing Tyelpe, am I? This isn’t a hunting trip.” 

“I never said it was,” Tyelko said shortly. “I said either Huan comes or I don’t come.” He crossed his arms over his chest _.  _

Curvo deliberated for a second. Feanaro could see the cogs and gears turning behind his dark eyes as they narrowed, churning out numbers and data, calculating the opportunity cost. “Fine,” he said finally, nodding once, and Feanaro knew he would never raise the issue again. “Huan can come.” 

Tyelko smiled, a real smile that warmed up his entire face like it used to when he was little. He crouched down, rocking forward on the balls of his feet, and put both arms around the huge shaggy beast, hands tangling in thick fur. Huan flopped his tail back and forth in appreciation. 

For a moment, Feanaro longed to reach through the screen and throttle him--  _ why  _ was he so gullible, so easily swayed?-- but then he realized that this could only work in his favor. He was already so tired, so heavy, like each organ in his body was turning to stone one by one. His sons could only retrieve the Silmarils with the cooperation of all seven, and the sooner his gems were back, the sooner he could fade in peace. 

“Wait-- there’s something in the sky.” One of the Ambarussa was pointing up, squinting through the trees at the blackness overhead. 

As his sons’ heads lifted, Feanaro looked up too, tracing the invisible line where sky met Void with his eyes. He heard the slow beat of giant wings before he saw them; heard dead leaves crinkle overhead as the stagnant air shifted and a huge, feathered shadow descended over Kano’s head; watched his son step back wide-eyed as it spiraled down, down. 

“Well met, Feanarions,” said its rider. The golden eagle bowed its regal head, flapped its wings, and stepped down onto solid earth. Nolofinwe’s heir peeled back his hood, grim face flickering in the beam of Moryo’s lantern. 

“Findekano? But how-- oh  _ Valar,”  _ Kano gasped, with the tight voice and stunned expression of someone who’d just been doused in ice water. Curvo clapped both hands over his mouth. There was something else on the eagle too, a limp, deflated silhouette whose head lolled over Findekano’s shoulder. His face, crisscrossed with cuts and burns, was barely recognizable, but the hair spilling tangled and blood-clotted over one gashed shoulder--  _ Nerdanel’s  _ hair, red as wine and licking flames-- Feanaro would have known it anywhere. 

“Is he…” Tyelko whispered. Feanaro had never heard his voice so quiet. Even Huan was still and silent, like a wood carving in his master’s arms. 

“No,” Findekano said, voice clipped. He was already climbing down from his mount, cradling Nelyo’s body in his arms like it weighed nothing. One of his legs was bent at a horrible angle, and, as Findekano spun slowly into the lantern’s light, Feanaro felt all the air leave his lungs in a sickening whoosh. Nelyo’s right hand had been lopped off at the wrist, and the stump, slick with crimson blood, looked so  _ wrong  _ dangling by his side that tears pricked at his numb eyes. “But he’s losing a lot of blood. I-- we need to get him inside right away.” 

… 

They carried Nelyo inside the largest cabin, leaving the wooden door ajar as Findekano laid his broken body reverently on the cot. Blood streaked the white sheets. Tears beaded in Kano’s eyes as he held his hands over his brother and sang slow and quiet, fighting to keep his voice steady. 

The others clustered around, pale and hushed like visitors at a funeral. Kano held Tyelpe, trying unsuccessfully to quiet his frightened sobs. Tyelko spun away from Nelyo’s battered, blood-streaked face, steps unsteady as he shoved the door open and slumped against the front step, hands over his face. How could this possibly be the same person, Feanaro thought, who had so candidly slit Teleri throats with his blade? 

Maybe it was Feanaro’s imagination, but something like burnished flame was illuminating Tyelko, lightening from wine-red to dark pink to orange, making his unnatural hair turn different colors. No, it wasn’t his imagination. Tyelko was looking up too, looking at the sky as its black color faded for the first time since the loss of the two trees. A great ball of golden fire was rising beyond the trees, casting fresh brilliance over the barren land. Even the scruffed dry grass looked beautiful in the new warmth, glowing wheat-gold. 

A blue banner floated through the trees, and as Feanaro caught a glimpse of its insignia, he waited for the familiar flash of loathing to seize his heart. It didn’t come. He watched numbly as Nolofinwe and his children, minus Findekano, emerged at the head of their force, draped in thick dark cloaks, ice crystals still clinging to the ends of their braids.  _ They crossed the Helcaraxe,  _ he realized in amazement. And they were unsheathing their swords, silver blades gleaming pink and gold in the new Sun’s glossy rays. 

“Irisse,” Tyelko said uncertainly, seeking out her face. 

Her eyes were as cold as the melting snow still coating her boots. She raised her bow and notched it. 


	8. 8

The first time the Silmarils tugged on Feanaro’s soul in the Void, he clutched, nails scrabbling, at the hollow place in his chest and convulsed with a scream that ripped itself from his body. Was there no refuge from this torment? Was it not enough that the numbness of the dark substance which swirled, smoke-thick, around his immobile limbs seeped into every tiny crevice of his being, freezing him solid from the inside out? 

The Valar were even crueler than he had thought, for not only had they designed as his punishment the viewing of a world of horrors-- horrors of his own invention-- but they had also ensured that there would be no rest for Feanaro until his Silmarils were returned. 

And oh, how the sleepless days and nights ached. 

He burned from lack of his gems, slipping occasionally in and out of hallucinations in which he held them, glossy-cool and bright like hope, stroking their dazzling shapes in his palms for precious seconds before they were snatched away and lost. Sometimes hot flames licked at their sides, scorching them, melting the gleaming stones until they seeped into lava and were gone. Sometimes he saw them sink to the bottom of the ocean, down, down until no light filtered through the inky water and the abyss swallowed them up. And sometimes he saw them glittering in the stars, forever out of his reach. Always, he saw his sons’ faces in their facets. 

Feanaro tried to stop agonizing over his sons’ decisions as they played out in front of his eyes. He did not curse Nelyo’s name as his heir, scarred and exhausted, lifted his bandaged stump of a right arm and abdicated the Noldor throne to Nolofinwe. He did not weep when he learned of Turukano’s wife, who’d gone to sleep on the ice and never woken up. Tyelko played with Tyelperinquar on a ruined battlefield, challenging him to leap between the orcs’ footprints in the mud, and Feanaro tuned out both their voices, distracted by the itch in his empty palms and the dull throb in the cavity in his chest. 

And it was easy enough to do such a thing, to remove himself from the narrative during this era of shiny new sunlight which the elves of Beleriand named the Long Peace. The Long Peace stretched out for so long it seemed almost like Forever Peace, and Feanaro almost forgot that it was impossible for him to step back from this narrative. He, the architect of this great unfinished house, had to wait for its walls to topple. 

…

Tyelko and Curvo went hunting often. Well, Tyelko did the hunting. Curvo sat on his horse and examined the map while his brother crouched hidden in the undergrowth, pulling the string back on his bow slow and taut. The deer, antlers shadowed in the dappled light, suspected nothing as the arrow sliced noiselessly through the air. It was dead in seconds, head still bent in the fragrant grass to take one last bite. 

Feanaro thought they made a good team. Tyelko would crouch down and slide the red-slicked arrow out of the deer’s tawny side, hoisting the lifeless thing that moments ago had been alive and breathing, heart beating, tiny deer brain full of tiny beautiful deer-thoughts about how sweet the summer grass tasted, over his shoulders like it was nothing more than a stuffed animal. Then Curvo would lead them home, Huan padding quietly beside the longer, spindly legs of the black horse. 

Sometimes they talked, sometimes they didn’t. Always, Curvo was careful to show respect when he looked at his brother, even with hands slicked red, leaves and thorns stuck to his muddy clothes. Feanaro applauded his favorite son for his cunning at first, and then started struggling to discern whether Curvo’s respect for Tyelko was truly an act anymore. Or whether it ever had been. 

…

“They say Findarato and Turukano had the same vision,” Kano whispered, dark eyes somber in the candlelight. “They say Lord Ulmo granted it to them.”

Nelyo’s eyes were closed. Set in his scarred face, pale blue veins flickering over the lids, they looked haunted. Nobody asked him about his time on the mountain. It was enough to assume what he had seen, to imagine the horrors that had raked those raised lines over his skin, carved dark shadows into his cheekbones. “What our cousins do is none of our concern,” he said. He sounded so  _ tired,  _ so slowly sinking, dragged down into black ink with stones tied to his feet, that Feanaro thought he understood him for the first time. 

“They say,” Kano said, a bit more urgently, “Ulmo told them this place is not safe. That they should build hidden kingdoms. Walled fortresses. They say preparations have already started in secret. They’re all leaving, Nelyo.” 

“Who’s  _ they?”  _ Tyelko crossed his arms over his chest, looking ornery, but he was so transparent even Feanaro could see right through him. There was a wounded look in his eyes beneath the glare _.  _

Kano visibly flinched at the roughness in his voice. “I hear it in the music of the air,” he said quietly. “The wind is singing about it. It’s been written.” 

Tyelko forced a laugh. “I think you’ve finally lost it, Kano,” he said, in a poor attempt at masking hurt with derision. Curvo shot him a look, but he shoved past him and was gone, door banging shut behind him.

Kano looked around, tears glistening in his wide eyes. He was so quick to cry these days. “I’m not crazy,” he said in a high voice; “I’m not! I was being honest.” 

“We know you were,” Nelyo said, voice a hollow replica of his old comforting tone. Moryo stared sullenly at the floor. 

Feanaro saw Tyelko storm down the dark hall, shove his way out the back door, and head directly into the moonlit woods. He was running by the time the trees overhead eclipsed the pale crescent in the sky. He ran like he had a destination in mind; a finish line, an end. But a hidden kingdom was a hidden kingdom. He ran until the new Sun came up, replacing the silver mist with liquid gold, and collapsed onto a fallen log and put his head in his hands. Only Feanaro, who saw everything through his screen like an omnipresent, cruelly powerless deity, knew that he’d been heading in the wrong direction the entire time. 

The sky flickered, briefly changing from gold to bloodshot red, and Feanaro was reminded of what lay beyond the craggy mountains to the north where he had died. Of the part of his soul that gleamed, captured, on the brow of a monster. His empty heart convulsed.

…

Miles away, in a secret underground pocket untouched by the mountains’ malignant glow, the final new-chipped stone slid into place. Turukano smiled as he laid a hand on the keystone of his brand-new wall.  _ Nothing will ever come in, and nothing will ever come out.  _ He sent up a blessing to Ulmo, thanking the Vala for his mercy, thanking him for telling him how to keep his family safe. 

“Elenwe died on the Helcaraxe,” he said, a shadow of pain crossing his face. “No more. I will not suffer another loss.” The speech was grim, but the faces of his new people shone. Feanaro saw the hope in their eyes and felt a shudder slip down his spine. For the first time ever, that shudder was not accompanied with a visceral thought of  _ idiotic Nolofinweans _ . “As long as these walls stand, we will live in peace and harmony here.” 

Turukano raised a hand. “To Gondolin!” 

Irisse was the only one in the crowd who did not say  _ To Gondolin!  _ back. 

…

Dark fog swirled close to the ground, twining around pale ankles. Irisse was barefoot. Her shoes had sunk into the spongy mud miles back and she had abandoned them there to be swallowed by the forest. Thorns caught at her skirts, snagging on the white silk like they were trying to pull her back. She ripped them loose, swiped at the low-hanging leaves in her face, and forged on. 

Only Feanaro saw the pair of yellow eyes glinting in the shadows. Only Feanaro heard a forked whisper slide, venom-smooth, through the dusky air, lilting in incantation, spinning a curse like a glistening web, drawing her in. Only he saw her eyes dull, glazing over, and the blankness slip masklike over her face as she was caught, swirled into the brew of dark mist and enchantment. Feanaro had never cared much for his brothers’ children. But he wished, now, with sincerity that he had a voice that could permeate the Void and call Irisse back as she stumbled through the thick brush, blindly following the murmur that spun her closer. 

_ She was never supposed to be involved.  _ Spindly hands, so pale they were nearly gray, slid over her empty face, and frozen, she did not shudder.  _ She didn’t deserve this. She wasn’t supposed to be a casualty. _ No one but Feanaro heard the soft rip of fabric as the white dress fluttered to the blackened floor. The voice spoke to her, beckoning, reasoning,  _ spinning,  _ and hollow-eyed, slack-tongued, she nodded yes. 

And only Feanaro was there to see Irisse fall into the glow of those yellow eyes. His stomach turned for the first time since his death: a horrible reminder of the body he still inhabited, of the sins still unwashed from his filthy hands. 

…

Feanaro felt things now as he watched. The numbness that had initially engulfed him was slowly fading, leaving his empty heart raw and open and unguarded. The armor that had protected him from sensation was melting away piece by tiny silver piece, creating larger and larger chinks of vulnerability. Feanaro  _ felt  _ with an intensity that seemed to rip him apart, like his long-dormant emotions were making up for lost time. And always, always, he longed to close his eyes and know no more. 

Feanaro saw things that the elves of Beleriand did not. They, down below, saw only the slow-darkening sky and its roiling amber clouds and thought  _ a storm, an ill omen.  _ He saw the rising lava that lent its fiery hues to the atmosphere, saw the flickering eyes of the fallen god and his lieutenant who plotted in their mountain fortress, biding their time as they grew in power. The orc armies that streamed, unceasing, from the base of Angband were met with concern when they reached elf settlements: patrols were launched, blood spilled, barriers erected to keep out evil and the simmering, bloodshot sky. Only Feanaro understood the true breadth of the poison sinking slowly into the fabric of the earth, and when the volcano in the north spilled over and covered miles upon miles of field and moor and forest with searing, bubbling, Sun-sharp gold, only he had foreseen the damage it did. 

Nelyo trained relentlessly with his left hand until his old sword-skills came back to him, and those who saw him said he was more fearsome than before, that a white flame glowed in his eyes as he moved. And he looked at his ruined face in the mirror of his new home and decided to change his name.  _ Well-formed  _ could not describe the deep scars that raked across his hollowed cheeks and split his top lip in half, and he refused to be called  _ third Finwe  _ when he had left the line of succession. He would be Maedhros now, to others and in legends and in the private pockets of his own mind. 

Kano copied his favorite brother and picked a new name too, a Sindarized version of his amilesse. But it was not him who gained the title first, but the plain in which he stood and fought until lava licked at his face and chest and limbs, gold-bright-hot: it was a miracle he lived to see it called Maglor’s Gap. Feanaro had always thought his second son weak, had rebuked him for being content to quietly follow. And he still could not fathom Ka— _Maglor’s_ willingness to die, could not understand _why_ he would give his life so easily, like he thought himself as sacrificable as his horse that sank beneath the aurous waves. 

Tyelko was renamed in the way characters in myths are assigned epithets: passively, resignedly. He let himself become Celegorm, claiming even to Curvo that he didn’t give a fuck what anyone called him, but Feanaro saw him wince every time he had to answer to it. He wished he didn’t understand  _ why _ he did not protest the change, wished it wasn’t because Celegorm believed himself so far gone from Tyelko of Valinor that that child was an entirely different person. The new, ugly Sindarin name was perfect for who he was now: a person with tainted hands and guilt on his conscience; a person who dealt with that guilt by adding more on top of it, a person who reveled in pain and lust and torture. A person veering dangerously close to the edge of irredeemability. 

Moryo was called Caranthir for his amilesse, and Feanaro did not pretend to care any more about this new development than his sullen fourth son seemed to: he let the humans who he traded with address him as such, and the expression in his black eyes could have been anything from mild irritation to vague appreciation to fierce self-loathing. Or, as was always the case with enigmatic Caranthir, all three. 

Curvo insisted on renaming himself Curufin, and Feanaro wasn’t quite sure how to feel about the opaque gleam of devotion in his eyes as he tipped his head upward, looking straight at Feanaro through the screen, proud radiance in his set mouth.  _ I am doing this for you, Atar.  _ As reverent as if Feanaro were the Creator. The concept both pleased and frightened him, for though he had used to consider himself a god of sorts, he was not so confident anymore that he was deserving of worship.

Tyelperinquar grew up fast, learned to walk and run and swing a hammer like his father, and he took the name Celebrimbor like he’d taken everything else in his life: without a choice. “He’s too young,” Curufin was always saying, with a firmness that eliminated debate; “he goes with me.” And he did, even though he was almost fully-grown now, without a choice. 

The Ambarussa did not choose new names at all, and Feanaro was glad for it. He did not wish to see his youngest sons rebranded to fit this cursed land, even as he himself posthumously became Feanor. He felt he barely knew the rest of his sons now, with their new names and new faces and new fates. 

Sometimes, when Feanor looked at Tye—  _ Celegorm’s  _ eyes, which seemed to be freezing and hardening like pale glinting ice, he thought Celegorm knew his own future with perfect clarity. That he could see all the way to the end of himself, and that he welcomed the fall. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> symbolic name change symbolic name change symbolic name change symb


	9. 9

When the sons of Feanor, no longer bound to the Noldor crown, parted ways in this newly sunlit country, Celegorm and Curufin went together. Feanor watched them leave; Curufin leading the way, looking uncannily like his father in new-forged silver armor, Celebrimbor by his side, and then Celegorm with Huan at his heels.

Feanor would have scorned him for this had he been alive. He would have made a barbed comment about how Celegorm followed Curufin like a dog followed its master, about how easily and how fully he gave his allegiance. And he would have been secretly unnerved by how he let himself seem tamed, but never lost the wildness that was innate to him. By how quickly that wide smile could turn sharp in the wrong glint of lighting. But now his tongue was bound like the rest of him. 

Celegorm followed Curufin to Nargothrond, Findarato’s hidden city: though they quickly learned that his people called him _Finrod_ now. Feanor felt like everyone he knew-- _had_ known-- was being refashioned to match this new landscape, redesigned with the sharp sounds of this alien language. 

Feanor barely recognized Finrod. He’d always glowed with the light of the new fire-ball in the sky they called the  _ Sun,  _ but now he was almost blinding to gaze at, glittering with jewels and gold and a new hardness in his eyes. He didn’t want to recognize Curufin with his zealous eyes, twisting in on himself like a burnt piece of parchment,  _ scheming:  _ but his face was like a mirror and in it, Feanor saw all the worst parts of himself. Celegorm was unchanged in many ways-- still a mindless follower, still too aggressive, still incapable of an indoor voice-- but he was starting to unravel at the seams, trying less and less hard to keep himself stitched up. It was frightening to watch a red glint like blood come into his eyes, and Feanor could do nothing but let him fall into it--  _ jump  _ into the clean-cut pain and twist of excess;  _ embrace _ the call of violence. 

Curufin told Finrod they were “just paying a short visit, checking up on family,” but his sweet smile didn’t reach his eyes. Finrod welcomed them in-- because what else could he do?-- and led them down his mirrored halls. Feanor half-expected to see a coiled serpent shining through the glass in Curufin’s place. Celegorm trailed behind, empty-eyed, and gave his own reflection a look that was truly murderous. 

…

Feanor wished he could plug his ears, tune out sound, do  _ anything _ to prevent his sons’ voices from floating into his head. The gravity of what they were plotting would have made him sick, had his body not been carved out of black night and hollow wind. The Void lent him the strength to keep his eyes peeled open and his neurons transmitting thoughts and precious little else: and so he watched and listened and swallowed the scratchy, skittering thing crawling up his throat.

“--so once our cousin has been disposed of,  _ we _ will claim succession,” Curufin was saying, in a slow and testy voice that suggested Celegorm was failing to grasp very basic information. “We have clearer lineage to Finrod than that cold fish Orodreth he wishes to make his heir.”

The way he said  _ disposed of,  _ as if Finrod was a bit of dead shrubbery instead of a living person, as if his murder would be nothing more than an aesthetic trim, made Feanor’s stomach seize up. Worse, Curufin’s voice was a perfect replica of his own. Feanor could practically hear his own thoughts curling smokelike around his son’s conscience, corrupting the root, whispering  _ this was his fight, his demon, his glory to chase _ . Curufin had that holy reverence in his eyes again, but now the gleam was black and cold and the spark in it fueled by lies.

Celegorm was silent. The look on his face was hard to read since his eyes always looked so dead now.

“If we take Nargothrond,” Curufin continued, peaked face glowing with fervor, “we will have the resources to try again at Angband. Our mistake before was lack of preparation, lack of forces. This time I  _ know _ we will be victorious.” He paused, a dangerous tilt in his black eyes as he regarded his brother’s face. “Well, Tyelkormo? Will you help me with our plan?” 

He said it lightly, gilded it with promise, even threw in a gratuitous  _ our _ , but it was a question weighted with expectation, and there was only one right answer. “Yes,” Celegorm said. 

…

The sky was an unnatural white the day Finrod announced his plan to help a man steal a Silmaril from Morgoth’s crown. 

“I am bound to the service of the descendants of Barahir for his mercy in saving my life,” he said, displaying the large ring that signified the oath. Sun-gold hair whipping in the sharp wind, face all chipped angles, Finrod was as hard as the jewels that flashed at his throat. “My promise is my duty to fulfill-- and yours, as subjects of Nargothrond. Who here will follow me, your king, to Angband?” 

His face glowed with a breathtaking madness. Feanor wanted to scream, to throttle it out, to close his hands round Finrod’s marble throat and send those sparkling beads bouncing over the stone floor. How dare he claim the right to start a quest for  _ his  _ Silmarils? How dare he pursue this  _ suicide mission  _ and be so sickeningly  _ righteous  _ about it-- like he expected someone to crown him with laurels for his bravery, his loyalty, his  _ goodness?  _

But Feanor did not need a voice to speak condemning words, or muscles with which to lunge and maim. Celegorm and Curufin moved as one, fluid, to defend his Silmarils, even as Celebrimbor drew back with shadows in his eyes. 

Celegorm drew his sword and said, loudly and with a frightening vacancy in his pale eyes, that anyone who dared to take and keep a Silmaril would have no salvation from his pursuing hate. Curufin’s speech was worse. Feanor  _ saw  _ things as he spoke, saw fire and blood and fallen pillars, saw bodies piled in empty streets under a sky speckled with the slitted gold eyes of ruin. Saw graves _ ,  _ hastily dug, rotting over with moss and grey crawling worms, heard the screams of children, smelled decay-- and shuddered with the rest as the illusion softly melted, leaving a prickle of permanent unease at the nape of every witness’s neck. 

Feanor had always known his sons would do anything for him, if he asked. The thought had never frightened him as much as it did now. 

…

Finrod and Beren set out for Angband anyway. Curufin laughed hollowly as their silhouettes slipped over the mountains, shadows stretching gossamer-thin in the wake of a colorless dawn. “They won’t be back,” he said. 

Celegorm turned away so his brother wouldn’t see the illness on his face. In the Void, Feanor felt the reverberations of the party’s fading footsteps, light with the optimism of morning and movement and fresh beginnings, and shuddered in his still, dark tomb. 

…

Celegorm first saw  _ her  _ in the forest. 

Huan burst out of his grasp and disappeared between the dappled trees, and in the clearing where the hound at last stopped his flight was something like a mirage, too bright and too beautiful to look at. She spun and sang a song so hopelessly perfect that the falling leaves seemed to stop, suspended in beams of gold. 

Her hair was dark and flowed loose. Her white dress gleamed as it billowed out around her. Feanor watched Celegorm stop short, face pale, eyes wet, motionless under her spell or something else. 

Curufin stumbled through the brush, batting leafy branches out of the way, and the bubble-like illusion popped. She turned slowly, the last note of her song quivering in the jeweled air. Her face was eerily perfect: a symmetry of legends, clean wisdom in her eyes, bluer than sky, bluer than anything. “I’m looking for my lover,” she said, and sang a description flawless enough to paint a living replica. “Have you seen him?” 

“Allow us to help you locate him,” Curufin said at once, bowing. Of course he recognized Beren’s image, Feanor thought, spine prickling: he would be a fool not to grasp the opportunity here. “My lady.” 

He kicked Celegorm swiftly in the shin, making him hold out a stiff hand, still with that shell-shocked look in his eyes. Feanor had to close his eyes for a moment, so blindingly bright was her face as she took it. Surely, this girl had to be some brand of enchantress. She made both of his sons look like ghosts of themselves, wasting away in the shadow of her aura. Celegorm in particular looked like a large segment of his soul had melted away with one touch of her starlit palm. Like he was remembering things he’d tried for far too long to forget. 

Curufin spoke for him. “It is our pleasure to offer you our assistance, Lady…” 

“Luthien. Daughter of Thingol.” 

Curufin’s smile was thin and smug. 

…

Curufin slammed Celegorm’s bedroom door shut, jamming the gold key into its socket and twisting it hard. “Do not advertise her presence here: it will not bode well for our plan if she is discovered.” Luthien’s fists drummed a dull, rapid rhythm through the barrier at first, then gradually slowed like the spasms of a dying heartbeat. 

Celegorm nodded mutely. He looked more alive and yet more dead than before: the color on his cheeks was unnaturally bright against his corpse-white skin. 

“You will marry her by the end of the month,” Curufin said flatly, not bothering to lower his voice. On the other side, Luthien struck the door hard with both fists: a protest. “She is the princess of Doriath. This political connection will prove advantageous for us.” 

“Yes,” Celegorm said, too quickly. It was his default response to Curufin’s orders, but this time was different. There was a new light behind his hollow eyes, a sharp white flare that wanted to  _ take,  _ to  _ consume,  _ and he was no longer trying to reign it back in. 

Even in the years where the Trees’ light had brightened their faces, even when he had still slept beside Nerdanel--  _ Eru,  _ it felt like an age and a half had passed since then-- Feanor never would have declared himself an expert on love. But he knew enough to understand with clarity that there was none here. 

…

Bruised fists stilling their beat at last, Luthien slid to the floor of her sumptuous prison, white skirts pooling on the wine-red carpet. She held her breath to suppress the sob that threatened to work its way out of her throat. She would be strong. She would not be caged for long. 

Miles away, lit by the pale rays of a spectre moon, a different pair of bruised hands squeezed a horse’s reins tight as its rider, barefoot, kicked _.  _ A different white skirt floated up under a starless sky as she raced on, and the pale boy in her lap watched the trees grow smaller with eyes used only to darkness. 

A graceful shadow padded, four-legged, down the silent hall. Its silhouette in the gilded mirrors was long and sleek. Huan held a golden keyring in his mouth and did not look back at the open door behind him, where Curufin slept empty-pocketed, and Celegorm slept shivering without the grounding weight at his feet. 

The guards at the hidden gate were merciful: they listened to her pleas and let her in, though her dress was torn and her feet were muddy and she clutched a strange boy to her chest. The throne room was chilly; the white marble gleamed too bright and stung her unaccustomed eyes. “Whose son is he?” her brother asked, incredulous. She lifted her chin and said “Mine.” 

The door swung open with a soft creak. Luthien startled, expecting to see one of  _ them;  _ but the voice which spoke to her in the shadows was soft and calm, and it resonated inside her head instead of in the room.  _ I am on your side,  _ he said, nudging her side with his soft wet nose.  _ I am here to help you escape.  _

_ He  _ was here. He had found them; the double doors opened with a bang that rent her hope in half. He stormed in, a black blot against the white brilliance that had once been her home, and she balled her fists and longed to scream. He spoke to her brother, harsh words of discord, threats of violence. He said that he had a right to take her back, that he  _ owned  _ her. Fury thrummed bright in her head. She was owned by no one. 

“May I ride you?” Luthien whispered. The night was black and the air was cool and it smelled like freedom, tasted like dew. The hound bowed his head and let her curl her fingers into his thick fur, climbing astride him: with a great bounding leap he was running, and her hair was streaming behind her. Beren was waiting for her at horizon’s end. She was free. 

The black-tipped spear spiraled with perfect aim at her son’s heart, and she did the only thing she could do. She jumped. She knew the instant it embedded itself in her shoulder and its poison pulsed icy-numb through her veins that this was it; that she was going to a place he could not follow. The white marble was cool against her cheek. Aredhel--  _ Irisse-- _ closed her eyes. She was free. 

Feanor wept invisible tears for both of them. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fun fact: the final section of this chapter, with the aredhel/luthien parallels, is my favorite passage in this fic. 


	10. 10

Finrod and Beren laid in the crevasse of a vast black cave, scraped bodies crumpled on jagged rock, wrists and ankles bound with heavy chains. They heard padded steps, claws clicking soft, the hoarse pants of tainted lungs: blood dripped from slender fangs like crushed garnet, and the eyes which tracked them in the dark were bright with hunger. 

Feanor could  _ feel _ the death in the air: each rip of flesh projected acutely onto his own body until he writhed in agony, mouth open and emitting silent strangled yells. Sauron’s wolves killed one by one until ten travelers were dwindled down to two, and as they snapped necks and bit into arteries, he felt their muzzles sink into his own skin, teeth burning with corrupted lava. He saw his sons’ faces on seven of the bodies resting in mangled shreds amid the needly stalagmites. The eighth corpse took his own shape. 

Pale haunches sank low, onyx eyes glittering, pupilless. Beren tensed, and Feanor could see his final thoughts. Luthien sparkled in the air. He wanted to die with her face in his mind’s eye. 

“No!” Something clanked frantically in the dark, scraping rough against stone. Finrod’s hair, eyes, face glowed a frightening white-gold, painful to look at like the Sun: neon light flooded the cave. He yanked at his bonds with freakish strength, and broken links bounced everywhere like drops of metal rain.  _ “Beren--!” _

The wolf leapt. So did Finrod. 

Teeth clacked, nails gouged, pale fingers tore at fur and sprayed blood in the air like mist. Finrod’s eyes were gold slits. The thing ripped a chunk from his shoulder, and the noise he made was inhuman-- a  _ snarl  _ in the language of beasts. He smashed its head against the rocks, dug grooves in its red-clotted pelt, and even as it bit his throat, closed his hands around its neck and thrashed. 

Sauron’s wolf went limp in his red-slicked hands, gut torn open and spilling. Finrod spat out blood and sank down too. Beren choked out a cry and lunged forward, but it was too late. “Farewell!” said Finarfin’s heir, and died with a tranquil smile on his bloody lips. His oath complete at last, he’d died a hero, just as he’d wanted. 

Red lightning shot into the sky, crackling with what seemed like gleeful laughter. On the other side of the mountains, Celegorm dropped a crystal glass on the floor, not even flinching as it shattered. 

“Honestly, Tyelkormo. Do try to be more careful.” Curufin pursed his lips as if he hadn’t felt it too, barely concealing a grim smile. Nargothrond was theirs. 

_ Fools!  _ Feanor thought hopelessly. 

…

Celegorm and Curufin could not control the discord that spread, fast as a virus, through their ill-won city. Talk of treachery, of  _ murder, _ reared its lethal head hard, and the flimsy reins slipped out of their hands. Even Curufin’s honeyed tongue could not keep them long in their unstable seat of power. They were banished within a fortnight. 

“Fuck you!” Celegorm said, spitting at Orodreth’s feet. It was stained pink from a cut on his lip. More scrapes, in clusters of three like clawmarks, crawled up his left side, still glistening fresh. Curufin didn’t even try to stop him anymore from running unchecked in the forest, wrestling wild things with his bare hands,  _ hurting  _ himself in the frenzy to burst blood, crack bone. 

To his credit, Orodreth didn’t flinch. Finrod’s jeweled crown washed out his pale face, but he looked regal enough as he flicked a hand and said “Get out of my sight.” 

Curufin only smiled. Feanor didn’t like the look in his eyes: it was the same pinched conviction he’d seen in the polish of his own armor as he’d ridden to his death. “So be it.” 

…

Celebrimbor swallowed hard. “I said I’m not coming.” 

Curufin was silent for a moment, eyes roaming over his son’s face. “You have no idea what you are saying. Think carefully before you choose.” 

“I have thought about it. I’ve  _ been  _ thinking about it for months,” Celebrimbor said hotly, fists clenching at his sides. “I-- I never wanted to stand by and let my uncle die. I can’t support you anymore, and I won’t.” 

Curufin looked affronted for a half-second, then flicked the emotion away. “Very well.” Deliberate as a striking snake, his hand shot out and seized the eight-pointed star at his son’s throat, snapping the chain. “Then consider your status revoked.” He didn’t have to specify  _ your status as my son.  _ That much was brutally clear. 

He was silent as they passed through the gates, Nargothrond growing smaller behind them. Celegorm didn’t press it. Feanor knew neither of them would never speak Celebrimbor’s name again. 

…

“I’m not going to  _ fucking  _ Himring,” Celegorm said, wheeling his horse around to stare, cold-eyed and incredulous, at his brother. “You think Nelyo will be pleased to see us?” 

“Do not attempt to debate with me, Tyelkormo.” Curufin’s voice dripped with tired venom. He was thinner than ever, eyes ringed with dark smudges. It unnerved Feanor to see the the loss of his son simmering on his face. “We are going to Himring because we have no other choice. I will deal with Nelyafinwe should he choose not to welcome us.” 

Celegorm looked mutinous as he dug his heels into his horse’s side. “Fine.” Down below, Huan bowed his shaggy head in silence.

A new, deep cut on his cheek glinted scarlet in the low light. Feanor had watched him spit curses as the orc’s blade nicked him, watched him drive his sword into the foul thing’s chest over and over, letting black blood spurt hot and thick over his hands even after it was long dead. He knew Celegorm scared Curufin: saw in every careful sweep of his eyes a calculation of risk, an instinct to shy away. An understanding that Celegorm could snap him in half like a twig if he wanted to-- and an understanding that there was very little these days keeping him from wanting to. 

He knew Curufin scared Celegorm, too. Celegorm was Curufin’s pawn, his sidekick, something that could be  _ disposed of  _ as easily as Finrod should he prove no longer useful. Curufin scanned maps and charts with those cold, cold eyes, gaunt face set into grim lines, and pointed calmly at places to burn and people to kill, all for the sake of the Silmarils, all for the sake of  _ Feanor.  _ He held his reins in rigid hands now and rode on stiffly ahead, Celegorm trailing behind as usual. 

“Stop,” he said, holding up a skeletal hand. Celegorm halted his horse. 

Hushed voices floated in on the chill wind. When Curufin turned to look at his brother, his eyes were black as blood. “It’s  _ them _ .” 

Celegorm’s face twisted into something dark, something that made Feanor’s dead heart miss a beat. He glanced up at the filmy sky and made eye contact with him through the Void-screen, almost as if he  _ knew  _ Feanor was watching. “Then we’ll ride them off the path,” he said harshly. “I never want to see that sorceress and her filthy  _ atan  _ lover again.” 

Curufin spurred his horse on and went without another word, speeding at an angle through the shadowed trees. For a fraction of a second, Celegorm looked like he was going to cry, but the deadness in his eyes won. Feanor saw him grip his reins bone-hard, nails cutting into his palms. 

“Come, Huan.” 

…

They burst out into an open clearing ringed with curls of thick fog. Celegorm bent low over his horse’s head and aimed for the man, pale hair streaming out like ice. Feanor knew he didn’t have it in him to kill the princess. She was wearing white again, rippling sleeves lit up in the sun’s rays, and he could see the anguish in his eyes as he tried not to look. 

Luthien’s scream rent the air. Celegorm didn’t stop. Didn’t even turn his head to watch Curufin reach down and snatch her, throwing her roughly onto his saddle. Hooves thundered on the ground like a drumbeat; Luthien flailed, kicking and scratching at her captor, and still Celegorm did not change course. 

He was mere feet from Beren now. The man’s face flashed with fear, but he stood his ground. Feanor’s lidless eyes peeled wide open and streamed with stinging tears as he was forced to watch, longing futilely for just a  _ moment  _ of darkness,  _ anything  _ to stop him from witnessing this. 

And then suddenly Luthien was flung into the grass in a tangle of skirts and a horrible choking noise issued from Curufin’s throat as Beren’s hands closed tight around his airway. Feanor didn’t have time to comprehend _how_ he’d jumped so far before Curufin’s head cracked against hard ground with breathtaking force, hands scrabbling at his throat. The riderless horse danced, spooked, hooves wheeling in empty air, tossing its sleek dark mane. 

Celegorm nearly slipped off his own horse as it reared too, breaking course. “ _ Help--”  _ Curufin coughed, eyes bulging. 

Kneeling in the grass, Beren tightened his hands around his neck. “You traitorous snake,” he roared, shaking him so hard Feanor could _feel_ Curufin’s skull vibrating. It was like watching himself be tortured; he hated and loved how right and wrong it felt that he could squint and his son’s face became his own, identical pallor and sharp angles, identical rage and pain. “You dare touch my wife? You dare obstruct our path?” 

Luthien struggled to her knees, dark hair a wild mess around her face. She was even more beautiful now, crackling with a new and wild magic. Her eyes contained the fury of a storm-tossed sea. 

Celegorm didn’t think. Feanor knew he didn’t. No hesitation showed in those empty eyes as he ripped a spear from his saddle and aimed it at Beren’s throat. “Get your filthy hands off my brother--!” 

He was on the ground before another word could leave his mouth. Huan slammed his huge paws into his shoulders, forcing him deep into the packed, muddy grass, a growl coming from low in his throat. His eyes, always uncannily watchful, were suddenly not those of a dog but of an elf, and they were glazed with shame.  _ I reject you,  _ they said.  _ You have let me down.  _

“Get-- get  _ off _ of me, you stupid, Valar-damned beast,” Celegorm swore, struggling futilely to shove Huan’s paws away. “You bastard-- Curvo is  _ dying  _ and you won’t let me-- you follow me for  _ years  _ only to leave  _ now-- fuck you!  _ Fuck the Valar and fuck you, you unfaithful piece of shit!” 

In the grass, Curufin choked and Beren shook him and Luthien pressed a lily-white hand to her spinning head and Huan snarled and snapped his teeth at his former master and Celegorm shouted profanities that no one even heard, tears shining in his eyes. In the Void, Feanor felt hot wetness trickle down his ghost of a face. He didn’t know the pallid, gasping skeleton against whose throat Beren now pressed the blade of a short knife. He didn’t know the flushed, Valar-cursing brute, more amoral than his own hound. He didn’t _want_ to know his sons. He didn’t want to remember they were his own flesh and blood. 

“Beren--” Luthien was running, torn skirts floating up like a surrender flag. “Beren, stop! Please don’t kill him. He-- he’s not worth it.” 

The knife slipped away from Curufin’s throat. Reluctantly, Beren loosened his hands. Curufin spluttered and coughed, mottled color seeping back into his death-white face. “Get up,  _ snake.  _ I will take these--” he deftly divested Curufin of all his weapons-- “and your horse as compensation for your handling of Luthien. I hope he’s happy to be freed from your cruel service.” 

Huan released Celegorm at last and bounded across the clearing to Luthien’s side. Celegorm sat up, covered in bits of grass and looking dizzily outraged. His spear lay beside him, snapped cleanly in half. “And  _ you,”  _ Beren told him, “can go back to your people in disgrace, and tell them exactly what you’ve done that was so despicable that even your  _ dog  _ couldn’t condone it.” He took his wife’s hand and led her through a gap in the sunlit trees without another word, Huan padding along contentedly by their side. 

Curufin spit dark blood into the grass and climbed unsteadily to his feet. Beren’s handprints around his throat were already beginning to bruise purple. “Give me your bow, Tyelkormo,” he demanded, watching their retreating backs. 

Celegorm didn’t move, didn’t even blink. Luthien’s dress was a white speck mirrored in his eyes. 

Curufin snarled impatiently. “Must I constantly repeat myself? Your  _ bow,  _ please!” He yanked it off his back and jammed an arrow into the notch, pointing it directly at Luthien. Feanor watched his face contort as he pulled back the string. “Go hence unto a swift and bitter death!” 

Feanor knew what would happen before it played out; saw the determined light in Beren’s eyes and watched him move, throwing himself in front of her, clenching his jaw as the arrow sliced into his shoulder. Curufin smiled viciously as Luthien cried out, but Celegorm just stared with hollow eyes as scarlet blood welled up, dripping into the grass. 

Huan leaped at them, claws out, barking sharply. Celegorm seemed to stumble away in slow-motion, like he’d rather stay still and let him rip his innards out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> curufin's line "go hence unto a swift and bitter death" is taken directly from the silmarillion. it was too good to leave out lol. 
> 
> the scene where huan turns against celegorm made me cry the first time i read it. i hope i did it justice here.


	11. 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw for self-harm and suicide attempt.

Horseless, weaponless, they ran through the trees on foot. Huan would not relent. His barks and growls echoed behind them for miles, a chilling cacophany. Curufin shot the remainder of Celegorm’s arrows at him, but they all seemed to miss, bouncing off trees and deflecting into the shadows. 

Celegorm was shaking by the time they burst out into the twilight, hair and eyes tinted red in the erubescent mist. “Don’t talk to me,” he bit out, shoving Curufin’s cold hand off his shoulder, and stalked back into the undergrowth, a sharp and savage glint in his teeth, bared like an animal’s. 

Feanor knew what he was going to do. If he had had a mouth, he would have screamed, pleaded,  _ begged  _ for darkness, for the screen to vanish, for anything but this sick, warped  _ watching _ . Celegorm took a long, thin dagger from his belt and threw it so hard at a rabbit half-concealed in a bush that the poor creature was skewered to the ground. He sat cross-legged in the dust and quietly hacked it to pieces, slicking up his hands with red and bits of fur. Then he took the knife and cut shallow lines up and down both of his own arms until blood trickled down in thin stripes. 

Curufin was speaking to Maedhros in a dim-lit room not far from here, using his smoothest voice to explain what he called not an exile, but a “temporary displacement,” wincing artfully as he let his collar slip to reveal his bruised throat. No one came to find Celegorm. He watched the sun rise with reddened eyes and pulled his sleeves down as far as they’d go and walked back to Himring on dead legs in the morning. 

“Are you going to tell us whose  _ blood _ that is, Tyelko?” Maglor was thinner, solemner now, and he fretted over Celegorm’s torn tunic and sticky, filthy hands like a mother over a child’s scraped knee. 

Celegorm pulled away. “Does it fucking matter?” 

…

Feanor felt the Silmaril’s rescue before he saw it, as relief enveloped him in an unreal rush. The story that came later doused that bliss-soft warmth like ice water. 

The bards who sang of Luthien’s success called her otherworldly: she was half-Maia, supernaturally strong, with a voice that could shatter the eardrums of gods. They said she spun an invisibility cloak of her own hair, draped herself in stars and darkness and marched into Angband with fire in her eyes. She gave her heart to a mortal man, and it was for him she stole the Silmaril from under Morgoth’s nose: their  _ love  _ was said to be the driving force behind her power. Luthien scorned immortality, laughed in the face of death, wove enchantments with the notes that poured from her inhumanly perfect lips. 

She gave the Silmaril to her father, for she had no desire to keep it for herself. The relief which had dazzled Feanor, quenched his long-parched, withered soul, now twisted round his cursed limbs in shackles, wrenching pain from his feeble joints, as Thingol withdrew deep into the heart of his kingdom and locked the gem in a silver box, confining its light to his eyes only. 

…

Three dark birds turned curving circles in the gray sky. One’s wing was gashed. One was missing a beady black eye. The third’s talons dripped scarlet. 

Curufin’s hand shook on the handle of his dagger, but he kept it clamped there at his side, eyes slanting as he flicked them left and right. The air stunk of orc-blood and a streak of it crusted his wan cheek. Maglor was curled in on himself, shuddering, dark hair a tangled, wind-whipped mess stuck to the hot tears on his cheeks. Celegorm’s face was unreadable as stone. They wound their way slowly around the heaps of ripped flesh and crumpled armor and sick, steaming blood. 

A figure knelt on the ground, head bowed in shadow. Feanor would have missed him amid the dead had a short sob not torn its way out of his throat. 

“Get up, Morifinwe.” Curufin pulled Caranthir to his feet, and Feanor’s stomach twisted as his ashen-faced fourth son shied away from Curufin’s cold gaze. “Now is not the time to mourn. We must find Nelyafinwe and rebuild.” 

“Nelyo…” 

The whisper seemed to sap Caranthir of all his strength. Feanor watched a dark line of blood trickle from a gash on his forehead. 

“Where is he?” Curufin demanded. “Alive, I hope.” Maglor twitched and uttered a small, gaspy sob, face hidden behind the blood-streaked curtain of his hair. 

Caranthir’s hand shot out and gripped Curufin’s forearm hard enough to pierce skin. “Don’t go looking for him,” he said through clenched teeth, like a wire was embedding itself deeper in his ribcage with each word. Pain contorted his eyes, his mouth, his whole grey-tinged face. “I saw-- I saw--  _ don’t-- _ ” 

“Release me,” Curufin hissed, wrenching Caranthir’s hand away. Five red crescents marred his pale wrist. Feanor saw Celegorm’s eyes trace the marks, narrowing in on the familiar glint of blood, a sick comfort amid the piles of death surrounding them. “You are speaking nonsense. If you know where Nelyafinwe is, lead us to him immediately.” 

Maedhros was stooped against the wind like a dying man. The three birds made a lopsided halo over his head. The one-eyed one cawed once, and it sounded like a hacking laugh. He was staring at something in the dirt, flattened by countless hooves and feet and balrogs’ whips. A ribbon that once was gold, frayed to threaded bits, lay atop the pulpy mess. 

Maglor clutched at his hair and screamed long and loud and raw, but even his anguish made a beautiful song. He dropped to his knees in the mud and clawed at his throat and sobbed like he wanted to rip it clean out, his greatest talent turned worst nightmare, cursing him now to sound angelic in the face of blackest horror. Maedhros shook silently with the force of Maglor’s cries, like his own grief was leaving him through his brother. And in the Void, Feanor’s broken soul retched, and retched, and retched. 

Curufin shaded his eyes with a pale hand and inhaled sharply. It would be cruel to pretend not to know what he was looking at,  _ who  _ it was ground into the gore-stained dust under their feet. “I am sorry, Nelyafinwe. Findekano fought bravely.” 

Something appeared to snap in Celegorm. His eyes flashed like blades as he lunged forward, seizing Curufin with unsteady hands. “Don’t pretend to fucking care, you-- you--” 

No one grabbed his sleeve and yanked him backward. No one even flinched as he pulled back his bloodied fist and punched Curufin viciously in the chest. Celegorm was yelling, baring his teeth, raining blows on Curufin, and nobody moved a muscle to stop him. “You never cared! We all know you don’t give a shit he’s dead! Stop fucking _playacting_ or I’ll-- _I’ll kill you!”_

“Stop, Tyelkormo,” Curufin finally managed, ducking under Celegorm’s arm and twisting it deftly behind his back. Ill-disguised contempt laced his voice. “You are behaving like a wild animal.” 

“Get your filthy hands off me,” Celegorm said, voice cracking. “Fucking s-snake.” 

He wrenched his arm away from Curufin and ran, boots squelching in the sticky guts underfoot. No one called him back. 

The forest swallowed him up fast, reeking of death. Celegorm spat a mouthful of blood into a tangle of bulging, intestinal roots. Feanor watched him slide out his sword and choked down a rush of bile, fearing the worst. But all he did was steady himself against a blackened tree, grasp his ponytail, and slowly, methodically saw off the bottom six inches. 

He ground the silver strands that fluttered down into the mud with his heel, but they still gleamed unnaturally. 

…

Maedhros tried to hang himself six days later. Amras discovered him in a rotting shed in a thatch of pale, musty wheat off the path, scarred fingers spasming as he tried to tie the knot around his neck one-handed. 

Amras’s screams alerted Amrod. Amrod alerted the others. They dragged Maedhros out of his would-have-been tomb and confiscated the rope. Maglor cried straight on through the night, but they rode on under the dull stars, swaying lifelessly on their dusty saddles, because there was simply nothing to say. Nothing to feel but the low, shuddering cadence of Maglor’s sobs permeating the blank fog. 

Feanor would have given everything to look away from the empty holes of Maedhros’s eyes. Look away from the knowledge that he had done this to him, that his damned oath had made his heir into this-- this  _ corpse _ . 

Celegorm said nothing. But under his sleeves, Feanor knew, new thin cuts glistened on his forearms. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is (imo) the darkest chapter in this fic, but the next couple will continue in this vein, so be wary & pls take care of yourself if that's not something you're into. i promise the happy ending is coming!


	12. 12

_ Tyelkormo:  _

_ I write to you with news of the death of my sister Irisse, called Aredhel Ar-Feinel in the language of this land. After her long absence from Gondolin, she returned under mysterious circumstances and was killed by one who called himself her husband. She leaves behind a son. Although you and I were never close, I know she would have wanted you to learn of her fate.  _

_ Regards,  _

_ Turukano, Lord of Gondolin  _

Feanor hadn’t wanted to read the letter. But the Void, as always, showed him no mercy. And worse than the words on the page, far, far worse, was the look on Celegorm’s face as he ripped Turgon’s message into tiny shreds, letting them spiral down into the fire to shrivel into sparks. He looked like he was already gone. 

…

The twilit camp was sickly-silent. Curufin slipped inside the dark tent with a wary look on his face, like he half-expected the body curled on the ground to be dead. He nudged the motionless lump with his foot, and calculated relief showed in his eyes when it stirred feebly. 

He knelt, cringing a little as his knees sank into the mud. “Tyelkormo, it’s late. Sit up, please.” 

Celegorm made no effort to move. Curufin pressed his lips together in pity or irritation and pulled him up by the shoulders. His head lolled forward. Curufin’s nails cut into his chin as he forced it up. “You know you are making a scene,” he said softly. “You cannot lay here like a corpse for days on end. It worries the others.” 

Self-loathing twisted Celegorm’s face as the first tear fell, slicing a pale track through the dusty grime on his cheeks. Curufin did not wipe them away. “I know you are… very upset. But this weakness will not be permanent. You will heal and get stronger. We  _ need _ you to complete the oath.” 

Celegorm’s collar soaked through quickly as the tears glossed over his face. “I do wish you would let me fix your hair,” Curufin said after a long silence, looking distastefully at the dusty, tangled mess, more gray than silver now. “Or at least  _ wash  _ it. This state of disarray is not acceptable for a son of Feanor.” 

“Fine,” Celegorm muttered hoarsely. 

Curufin smoothly tamped down the surprise on his face. It was most unlike Celegorm to acquiesce. “Good. There is a river not far from here. Stand up and we shall go together.” 

A cloak of fog hung over the mirror-still surface. They waded into the shallow silt together. Curufin was neither gentle nor rough as he held his brother down, forcing the dust out of his hair in disciplining strokes. Feanor watched Curufin’s brisk, methodical motions, the tight clench of his jaw as he stripped him of his filthy clothes-- the way a parent would bathe a child post-tantrum-- and thought briefly of Celebrimbor. The thought was painful, so he swallowed it with difficulty. Celegorm did not struggle, just lay flat in the clear, greyish water with his eyes open wide and unseeing. 

“I still fail to understand why you did this.” Curufin was examining the ends of his hair, lopped off jaggedly just above his shoulders. “I have a knife with me now. If you would just let me trim it…” 

Celegorm’s face mutated, growing sharp.  _ “No.”  _

They climbed together onto the dripping bank, muddying their bare feet in the rocky grass, and Feanor shuddered at the sight of them, slippery like newborns, pale like ice. Dangerous things. Hell-spawn. His spawn. Celegorm’s hair was that unsettling silver again. He showed his teeth in a brief smile that looked more like a grimace. 

…

“Shut up, Moryo. I never should have told you anything.” Celegorm shoved him, hard. 

Caranthir stumbled into the side of the tent, wincing, but recovered himself quickly. “Yeah, you shouldn’t have. You’re losing it, Tyelko. If you think Nelyo would agree to--” 

“I don’t think there’s anything Nelyo wouldn’t agree to anymore,” Celegorm said darkly. 

Caranthir’s gaze flickered away for a second. They both knew he was right. “Well, you need all of our support, not just his. And I won’t be giving mine.” 

“You will if the rest of us do,” Celegorm muttered, clamping a hand down on the sheathed dagger in his belt. He was pacing, stirring up tawny dust with his restless feet, turning circles like an animal in a cage. “You will. You have no choice. None of us do, and you know that. If we don’t try this now, we’re only putting off what we know has to happen. Sooner or later--” 

Caranthir’s eyes darkened; a warning sign. Feanor could tell he was about to aim low. “You think going and getting yourself killed will make you some kind of martyr? You think throwing your life away will solve anything? You think it’ll bring  _ Irisse _ back to you?” 

Feanor barely saw Celegorm move. Just a flash of clenched fists, a gleam of silver, and then Caranthir was crumpled at the base of a tree fifteen feet away, bleeding from his temple. 

Celegorm’s face was bright red. Feanor had never seen him flushed like that before. “Keep her name out of your filthy mouth,  _ Carnistir,”  _ he said in a strangled voice. “Or I will slit your throat before you can scream for help.” 

…

His eyes were pale and wild. He pulled on his sleeves to cover the scars. “There’s a Silmaril in Doriath. You might think we have two options, but we don’t. There is only one. Either we go now and fight for it, or we don’t, and we succumb to the oath’s pull and go later. I, personally, am done delaying the inevitable. A second kinslaying,” Celegorm said. “Who’s with me?” 

…

“It doesn’t have to be a  _ kinslaying,”  _ Maglor said helplessly. “We could try bargaining… send another letter… we don’t have to  _ kill… _ ” 

No one was listening. 

…

The white castle glittered like snow in moonlight, a picture out of a fairytale. But the air was thick with dread, like the next page in the storybook was a severed head, a crimson sword, a snake’s gaping maw. It was the same heady adrenaline Feanor had reveled in at Alqualonde, but now it made him sick. 

“Listen to me, Tyelkormo.” Curufin curled his bone-thin fingers around the back of Celegorm’s collar and yanked it sharply down, forcing him away from the double doors. “You need to stick to the plan. Wait for my signal  _ before  _ doing anything rash. We are here to negotiate for the Silmaril; and if they give it freely, no force will be necessary. Remember that.” 

Celegorm looked more alive and more dead than Feanor had ever seen him. His eyes were those of a predator, barely a pinprick of pupil in the iris. White skin pulled taut over his cheekbones gave him the look of something half-feral, born out of the fog in the woods and hungry for death. “Fine,” he said shortly, promising nothing. “Let’s go.” 

They made a frightening pair, never more opposite or more the same: two splashes of black ink on the shining white floor, so horrifyingly out of place in this shrine of purity. The throne room froze-- king, queen and courtiers alike-- and watched the two invaders make their way to the front. Feanor saw his sons through Dior’s eyes and wanted to scream, because they were monsters. Killers. 

“Feanorians,” someone whispered. Reverent fear clung to the word, like greeting death. 

…

Celegorm grinned as he drew his sword. 

…

A woman screamed. A child wailed. Blood spattered the marble floor. 

…

Courtiers rushed for the shining doors; threw themselves against them, scrabbled at the golden knobs; cried out in despair to find them locked. Curufin looked almost bored as he swung and stabbed, sharp eyes shuttered up, closing all emotion out. Swift as a breath, he slipped his blade into a young man’s chest and slid it out as he crumpled, lips slicked red. Only Feanor could see the reverence on his face.  _ I am doing this for you, Atar.  _

A girl smashed a glass goblet against the wall and hurled it at Celegorm as she fell, gasping out her last rattling breath through the hole in her throat. He laughed like a crazy thing as the blood ran down his cheek. 

It was madness. It was murder. It was the worst thing Feanor had ever seen. It was the second fucking kinslaying, and he held his breath until he was dizzy because in spite of all they’d done, it would be his fault if his sons died. His fault. His fault. His fault. 

_ … _

Later, in the stories, it was always told like this: Curufin fell first, then Celegorm. Barely a sentence would be devoted to their fate in the tale of the Ruin of Doriath. Now, Feanor watched them bleed out all over someone else’s song of grief. 

Curufin fell first. Slit the throat of the silver-gowned queen and grimly watched her sink down, skirts pooling like liquid mercury. Gasped-- just once, a small soft sound of surprise-- as Dior’s blade pierced the space between his shoulderblades. Staggered to his knees, blood slicking his thin lips, and died with a curse half-formed in his mouth. A curse on himself, for failing to retrieve the Silmaril. For dying with the oath still incomplete. For not living up to the father he’d tried so hard to be. Feanor looked at his small body, crumpled on its side in a pool of dark red, and shuddered like it was his own corpse he was seeing. 

Then Celegorm. He ran at Dior with white fire in his eyes and Feanor knew at once what he was doing. He knew that when Celegorm wanted something, there was no stopping him-- and Celegorm wanted to die, because he had nothing,  _ no one  _ worth living for anymore. Dior’s sword hit his with a screaming clash. Both their teeth were bared, both hands white-knuckled on their hilts. Recognition bloomed in Celegorm’s empty eyes as he saw the son of Luthien, and his goal shifted slightly: he was going to bring Dior down with him, because this-- this relic of his  _ pain  _ could not go on living. He swung back and--

“Don’t do this,” Dior gasped. “Don’t do this.” 

…

“Don’t do this. Don’t do this.” 

This wasn’t Feanor’s memory. It couldn’t be, because the shadows ducking under the garden arch glanced over their shoulders to make sure no one was following. To make sure  _ he  _ wasn’t following. Feanor--  _ Feanaro-- _ had still been alive here. But the trees’ light was sucked out of the sky, and both their faces were wet and scared. 

“You don’t have to go with them,” Irisse said desperately. “We could leave right now. No one would ever know…” 

Tyelko covered his face with his hands. “I already swore the oath. I-- I don’t have a choice. I have to.” 

…

Something in Celegorm’s face snapped like a thread being cut.  _ I have to.  _ He brought his arm down and in one vicious stroke cut Dior’s throat open, painting the gold throne behind them with a spray of blood. And he smiled weakly when he saw the blade sticking out of his own chest. 

Out on the castle steps, Caranthir threw himself in front of a spear aimed at Maglor’s heart. He died right there at his brother’s feet. 

The Silmaril in Doriath glittered and called for Feanor, and he screamed and cursed and writhed, hating himself for the strings that linked his soul to those evil things, hating that his own hands had crafted them. Curufin and Celegorm and Caranthir lay still and silent as the survivors fled, and he knew their bodies would stay in the ruins of that castle till they were nothing but piles of chalk-white bones, rusted weapons resting by their sides. 

His four remaining sons rode away fast. Maglor was sobbing. Bent at the waist, clutching himself as huge, heaving gulps tore out of his throat, violent enough that he sputtered and vomited over the side of Maedhros’s horse. There was blood in his hair and Feanor couldn’t even say whose. 

Two small boys cowered behind the throne. An armored hand reached behind and yanked them out by their scruffs, ignoring their panicked cries. The star of Feanor glittered on their captor’s breastplate. Celegorm and Dior lay curled around each other on the floor behind him. “Throw the brats in the woods,” the soldier growled. 

“Nelyo-- Nelyo, please,” Amrod sobbed, tears turning to ice on his cheeks. Amras’s panicked breaths froze crystal-white in the air, hair whipping in the wind. “They’re gone. You’re gonna die if you don’t stop looking.” But Maedhros’s scarred face was contorted into something gruesome. “It’s the  _ least  _ I could do,” he hissed. “We destroyed these boys’ entire lives. Tyelko’s men--” He looked like he wanted to say something condemning, but he stopped, because mentioning Celegorm meant acknowledging that he was gone. “The least I could fucking do is die for them.” 

But he had to be dragged away as the sunrise crested the icy trees, lips blue, snow stuck to his hair and closed lashes. Maglor laid him by the fire and cried and cried and cried. 

For those twins, frozen somewhere in the forest. For the castle they’d ruined, the people they’d killed, the lives they’d ripped apart. For Curufin, who’d tried so hard to live like Feanor that he’d died like him too. For Caranthir, who’d done one good thing in the midst of all that horror and it had cost him his life. And for Celegorm, who’d died with a sad smile on his face because he’d gotten exactly what he’d wanted.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *finally,* my interpretation of the second kinslaying! i've been holding onto this for a loooong time. (also, is anyone surprised about the gratuitous celegorm/aredhel in this chapter lol)


	13. 13

Feanor flinched when the first body materialized next to him. 

It was Curufin, only not. Curufin, but his eyes were closed and his face was gray and the hole in his chest gaped wide open, exposing shiny ribs and slick pink flesh and blood, sliding down his bony hips and legs in long, dark rivulets. What was this new Void-torture? Was he going to be condemned to stare at his son’s corpse for all eternity? 

It was worse. It was so, so much worse. Curufin’s eyes opened and the ghost of thought pulled his face taut. Feanor could hear demons slithering around in his brain, tightening their coils around his bruised reason. And then the voices started. 

_ You’re dead. You’re alive. You’re in Valinor. You’re in the Void. Your heart is tearing itself out of your body bit by slimy bit and the pain that wracks your limbs, this hate curling venom-smooth around your wrists and ankles, is yours, yours, yours. You are Feanor and you aren’t. You always and never were.  _

_ You’re sick. You’re invincible. This is all in your head. No, it’s real-- it’s real, real. The Silmarils were and weren’t the solution. Even Celebrimbor knew that, but never you. Never you, and now you’ve lost him forever, but he haunts you-- we haunt you. This pain is the driving, nail-biting puncture of failure, but doesn’t it feel so soft and nice?  _

_ You twisted the truth when you lived. You should have been honest. You should have been a better liar. You should have lived longer and died sooner. Now we are here infesting you, crawling in your mind like cruel parasites, and do you want to know what we are? We belong to you. You made us. We love you and we hate you.  _

_ We are your lies.  _

Curufin cried and twitched, jerking like a puppet on a string, but the whispers went on and on. He was being eaten alive, poisoned by his own mind, and Feanor watched him claw at his own face, dragging red lines down his forehead and cheeks, trying futilely to gouge out the lies,  _ his lies _ .  __

_ … _

The spear was still embedded in Caranthir’s chest when he appeared, passing straight through his heart and oozing blood from both ends. He had died with his hands outstretched, mouth parted in his final scream, shot down at Maglor’s feet in one last futile act of kindness. 

On the screen, Maglor rocked back and forth and whimpered, tears slicing through the blood crusted on his cheeks. Feanor was struck by the realization that if Caranthir hadn’t died for him, he’d be here in the Void in his place. Caranthir flickered to life and blinked his empty eyes once, twice.

Curufin convulsed, whispering “No, no, no,” even as the voices in his head said  _ Yes, yes, yes, you’re filthy, you’re doomed, you’ll rot here alone forever.  _ Caranthir stared straight ahead, appearing not to hear, or even notice the floating, shivering body by his side. With a start, Feanor realized that they could not see each other. They were trapped inside their heads, watching a twisted web of hallucination of their own invention, and only he was cursed to witness  _ all  _ of their torture. 

The screen rippled and parted. Feanor gasped. Maglor, swiping at his tearstained face, was stepping through it: only it wasn’t Maglor at all. He was smudged at the edges, slightly translucent, like a rough pencil sketch of himself, and his dark hair floated around his face in an eerie underwater way as he glided toward Caranthir. His shattered expression gave way to a tranquil blankness. When he spoke, his voice reverberated in the quiet. “You should have let me die.” 

Caranthir paled and shook his head. “H-how could you say that? You’re my brother. I could never have let you--” 

“No,” the ghost-Maglor said, blinking his glowing eyes and crying tar-black tears that dripped down his cheeks like ink. “You weren’t supposed to die. I was.” 

“Kano, please,” Caranthir said, voice breaking. “I did the only thing I could.” He was pleading, bargaining with the apparition, blood from his spear-wound pooling sticky-dark at his feet. “If our positions had been reversed-- if it was me about to die-- you would have done the same, wouldn’t you?” 

A heavy silence fell over the air. Caranthir’s face crumpled. “…Wouldn’t you?” 

“I wouldn’t have interfered with fate,” the ghost said, and Feanor knew for sure that it, whatever it was, was not his son. Maglor didn’t have eyes like that, so dark and deep and cold. Maglor would have thrown himself in front of a flying spear for any of his brothers in a heartbeat. But Caranthir was crying, turning his face away from not-Maglor’s silver-blue light and blinking out hot tears of shame and self-loathing, and Feanor understood that this was his punishment. To be haunted by the image of what could have been, to be smothered by doubt until he was certain he’d done the wrong thing. To be guilted in death for giving away his will to live. 

…

Curufin and Caranthir had been limp, cold, dead, but Celegorm entered the Void with eyes wide open, limbs dragging at half-speed through the empty darkness like his death had been a finish line: even after he’d crossed it, he couldn’t stop his body’s momentum. 

He was injured like the others, but as Feanor watched, the hole in his chest knitted back together, skin smoothing out until it didn’t look like a blade had ever torn through his ribcage. Celegorm’s other cuts and scrapes were healing too. His split lip, the dark bruise on his cheek-- even the thin white scars on the insides of his forearms melted away. He looked frighteningly young without them. 

Celegorm stopped running, lowering the sword that had killed Dior. “Who’s there?” he demanded, staring hard at nothing. Feanor wondered if he was hallucinating. “Show yourself.” 

No one answered. “Just shut up,” Curufin moaned weakly, trying to claw the lies out of his bleeding forehead. On the screen, Maedhros scrubbed dried blood off of his armor in a frozen stream, gritting his teeth as his hand and stump turned mottled blue and the evidence of the second kinslaying slipped away in rusty swirls. 

“Show yourself!” Celegorm repeated.

The darkness in front of him shifted, molding itself into a slender shape. Celegorm’s entire body went limp with relief. “Irisse?” 

Feanor’s stomach seized. The Aredhel that stepped out of the empty air was blurry around the edges just like the not-Maglor that was tormenting Caranthir, gelid eyes leaking black tears of scorn as he held forgiveness just out of his reach. And she held a sword in her colorless hands. 

“Irisse, I’m sorry,” Celegorm said in a small voice. “I fucked up. I didn’t mean to become such a terrible person… it’s my fault you died…” 

“Yes, it is,” Aredhel said coldly, raising her weapon. 

Celegorm’s face cracked like glass. “I’m s-sorry,” he said again. “I understand if you can’t forgive me. It’s what I deserve.” 

“You deserve  _ death.”  _ The black of Aredhel’s eyes bled into the white until she had no irises at all, nothing but dark holes in her face. “And I’ll kill you myself for what you did to me.” 

She lunged at him. Celegorm deflected slowly, looking like he’d much rather just let her cut him to pieces. Aredhel bared her diamond-white teeth. “You’re not even  _ trying!  _ Fight me for real, you piece of shit, or I’ll make you choke on your own blood when I kill you.” 

“Just kill me, then,” Celegorm said, sounding pained. “Please, I don’t want to fight you--” 

He lifted up his sword to shield himself and-- Feanor didn’t even see how it happened, but suddenly Aredhel’s throat was oozing black blood and her eyes were fluttering closed. “No,” Celegorm gasped, trying helplessly to catch her. “ _ No! _ I-I didn’t mean to-- I didn’t-- oh god, Irisse, I’m sorry--!” 

But she was already gone, dissolving back into the nothingness she came from. The look on Celegorm’s face as he stared at his hands, empty and stained with dark blood,  _ her  _ blood-- there was no description for it. It was,  _ he _ was, everything evil and hollow and perverse, everything that needed to be dead. 

Celegorm picked up his sword, hands shaking, and rammed it hard into his own chest. But the blade passed through him like he was made of fog, and Feanor wept with him when he remembered the worst truth of all: that he could not be killed a second time. 

The atoms of the Void fused and rearranged, emitting a soft eerie glow. They formed the silhouette of a new body: pointy face, thin limbs; Curufin, dead-eyed and clutching the same sword Aredhel had held. Celegorm cried harder. “J-just leave me alone.” 

“No,” said not-Curufin in that soft lethal voice he used to cut deep and hard. “You deserve to die. No wonder I never trusted you when we were alive. No wonder she couldn’t find it in her to love a wild animal. A murderer.” 

But he, too, was spitting blood and crumbling to ash not a minute later. The shadows took the shape of Huan when they reassembled. Celegorm’s eyes went blank as the loop began all over again. 

…

Feanor took to watching the screen intensely: scrutinizing every detail of his living sons’ faces, analyzing every crack in their grief-sore voices. Before the second kinslaying, he would have given anything for its light to dim out, for the ability to turn his head away and close his eyes. But now-- now it was the best of his options, because it drowned out Curufin’s mumbled nonsense; Caranthir’s broken pleas; Celegorm’s cries of grief. 

Maedhros turned to stone a little more each day. His orders were empty: he had no land, no fortress to command, just the four of them wandering down long dust-paved trails like vagabonds. He barely spoke during the day, save to halt his horse when they stopped at a pond to rinse the blood out from underneath their fingernails, and at night tossed and turned and mumbled “Findekano” in a voice as scarred as his face. 

Maglor didn’t sing anymore. Feanor knew it killed him that they had had to leave Curufin and Caranthir and Celegorm in Doriath. He would have wanted to give them a proper burial, compose ballads in their honor-- but that would have been farcical. Kinslayers didn’t have honor.

Amrod and Amras killed orcs like they were supposed to, but they didn’t laugh like they used to. Their freckles stood out sharply on their drawn, pale faces. Feanor knew they wanted to go home, knew they longed desperately to return to Nerdanel, and felt a wrenching pain in his chest as he remembered the memory-faint curves of her face, the silky fall of her auburn hair. He wracked his brain for hours trying to remember the lilt of her voice-- but it was gone from his mind. Another thing the Void had stolen from him. 

Feanor had told himself his love for Nerdanel was dead for hundreds of years, but now he found he could not watch Celegorm when the Void-shadows, restarting their cycle of forms, became Aredhel. The look on his face as his sword slipped, his small gasp of horror as she melted back into the darkness-- it was too much, too similar to the long-dormant ache coiling up from the pit of Feanor’s stomach. He both hated and was glad for this new empathy, the empathy he had failed to show his sons while he was alive. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> finally, we get to see some of the other void punishments! i was inspired by dante's inferno here-- i wanted to explore the concept of a "personal hell" tailored to hurt each character the most while also mirroring their crimes.


	14. 14

Maedhros woke up sweating, panting. His right wrist, the one that ended in a stump, twitched against his chest. “The Silmaril--” 

“It’s okay,” Maglor said faintly, running thin fingers through his tangled hair. “It’s ok--okay.” His voice always had a tremor now. Nothing like the smooth murmurs of the thing that haunted Caranthir. 

“Tyelpe, please,” Curufin said hoarsely, “I didn’t mean to kill you… I thought you were my father.” He was insane; it hadn’t taken long for the lies to addle his brain. Feanor twisted away, unable to stop listening.  Gray morning dawned slow on the screen. Celegorm was fighting Orome now. The god of the hunt sank down, head lolling under the weight of his dark antlers, dripping blood from his throat just the same as all the others. Celegorm sounded scared as he said his usual broken “I-I’m sorry--” scared of his own power, because this wasn’t supposed to be possible; he wasn’t supposed to be  _ capable  _ of killing a Vala. But the Void didn’t listen to logic like that. 

Maedhros and Maglor and the Ambarussa packed up camp. Amrod kept shivering, cupping his pale hands over his mouth and trying to breathe warmth into them. A crescent moon still hung in the sky, half-hidden in pale clouds. All they did now was wander in circles, avoiding the only path they had left, the compass-like tug at each of their chests leading them straight to the Silmaril. 

“It’s not in Doriath anymore,” Amras said after a long silence around the fire. “Someone took it, and now it’s…” He didn’t have to say the rest. They all knew. They all felt exactly where it was. 

…

“Please,” Maglor said weakly, swiping at his wet eyes. “Please, no.” 

“I can’t wait anymore,” Maedhros said, crying too. “We have to just-- just go and try one last time. It’s the only way.” 

“No,” Maglor sobbed, “no, Nelyo, please… please let’s just wait a few more years; I could send another letter…” 

The tears on Maedhros’s cheeks ran over the bumpy ridges of his scars. His mouth pulled into something tight and thin and past hoping. “Do you think I want to do this any more than you do? Face it. Your letters never work, Kano. We have no other fucking option.” His voice broke. “I just-- I just want to be _done_.” 

…

The beachfront was silt-soft, muted blue and white. Silky shells ground to dust clung to the cracked soles of their boots, worn down from thousands of miles, millions of steps. Somewhere high overhead, a seagull cawed. 

“You did the wrong thing,” murmured Caranthir’s ghost-Maglor, smiling coolly to see the tears flow down his cheeks. 

Maedhros and Maglor drew their swords. 

Feanor was numb to the bloodshed this time, and he hated it. Hated that he could watch Maedhros lop off a woman’s head and feel nothing. Hated that the screams meant nothing to his ears, not when his own sons cried out in their Void-torture behind him. 

Hated that when he saw the bits of hacked-up armor, torn flesh and sinew, flame-colored hair ground into the bloody sand, his only thought was that he was about to have two new bodies to keep him company. 

…

The Ambarussa materialized at the same time. Feanor hadn’t been expecting that; he’d thought the Void would keep them separate. For one shining moment, as Amrod and Amras blinked awake, looked around at the gaping blackness, examined their own reassembled bodies, he thanked it for its mercy. 

Then: “Amras?” Amrod said faintly, voice small and thin. “Amrod?” answered his twin in the same tone, looking around. Identical panic bloomed on their identical faces.  _ “Ambarussa?” _ they cried in unison. 

_ No,  _ Feanor thought, wanting to tear out his own eyes, cut off his own ears, anything so he wouldn’t have to see and hear this.  _ No.  _ But the Ambarussa were folding in on themselves, crumpling, all alone in their own empty pockets of Void, separated from each other for eternity, and the true cruelty of it was that only  _ he,  _ Feanor, could see that they weren’t really alone at all. They would spend the rest of forever not knowing that their missing halves were right next to them. 

…

The Silmaril was truly gone this time. It had plunged off a cliff in the hands-turned-beak of a woman who’d soared over the sea as a white bird. It was in the sky now, glittering like a star on the helm of a floating ship where no sword, no net could snare it ever again. Unreachable. Maedhros and Maglor took Elwing’s small sons from the wreckage of that little beach town, as if a new set of twins would replace the Ambarussa, as if caring for someone else would wash off some of their guilt. 

Feanor started to think-- no, started to  _ know _ \-- that there was no hope left for his sons. And then he realized that Celegorm had known this all along. This was why he’d wanted to die, because it didn’t matter what any of them did, did it? It didn’t matter if they stayed or went, if they killed or saved, if they lived or died. The only thing waiting for them at the end of it all was darkness and pain. 

…

The new twins, _peredhel_ boys, were mostly Maglor’s. They called him atya and loved him in a twisted way, getting hugs and bedtime stories from the person who’d tried to kill their real parents, but Maedhros just sat in the shadows and traced the lines of his scars with his nails over and over, like he wanted to pull his skin off of his face in one bloody flap. 

There was a war. Feanor didn’t pay much attention to it. Nargothrond and Gondolin had already fallen-- Orodreth and his daughter crushed to bloody pulp in the claws of a dragon; Aredhel’s lonely twilight son drawn into Sauron’s soft whispers, body now resting at the base of the same cliff where his father’s bones lay. What little was left to destroy now went down in flames, crashing under the ocean, and all he could think was that Curufin and Caranthir and Celegorm and Amrod and Amras were under there. Their skeletons lay at the bottom of a vast dark sea, ribbed houses for silver fish, relics of a time now long-past and obscured. 

He thought maybe he was starting to fade. It was hard to focus much on anything anymore; like he was melting into the fabric of the Void, like the darkness was slipping over his eyes. But he heard Maedhros and Maglor’s gasps of pain as they finally held the Silmarils. Felt the jolt of shock as they dropped them in the grass, blinded by their piercing light, palms stinging with raw red welts. 

Felt Maglor’s cry tear his throat apart as Maedhros plunged deep into red-gold lava, clutching his gem in his burning fist, gone, smoke and ash like he’d wanted to be since the Nirnaeth, since the beginning. 

…

Feanor wasn’t awake for much of Maedhros’s Void-punishment. All he knew was that it involved Fingon tied to the side of that mountain at Angband. Maedhros was the one on the eagle this time, and Fingon’s hand was sliced off one, ten, a hundred, a million times. His scream was always the same: shock, agony, betrayal. Maedhros’s sobbed-out apologies were always the same too. 

…

Maglor wandered; Maglor cried. Maglor waded barefoot in the cold sea till his lips turned pale blue. Maglor sang through his tears for the first time in centuries, an endless wind-lost lament. His songs were all about the same thing, about how a million miles and a dimension separated him forever from his brothers. About how he was cursed to be the last survivor, to be the only one left to feel the sharp sting of the icy tide, to be a relic of worse times stuck on a new world where everything got to be reborn but him. 

Feanor slipped in and out of darkness. The gaps of time where he saw nothing, felt nothing, _was_ nothing increased in frequency. When he was lucid enough to grasp at thoughts, he recognized that he was fading, and took it as a blessing. He would rather be the Void than be in it. He would rather be nothing than be who he was, than do what he’d done. He would rather be dust. 

…

He opened his eyes and saw a golden sky. 

…

Feanor was laying flat on his back on solid earth. All around him, fragrant wheat rippled in a soft breeze, warmed by the Sun’s glow. No darkness, no static suspension, no  _ screen,  _ just a plain summer field and the fluttering call of a bird high overhead. 

This was Valinor-- well, it was and it wasn’t. Feanor couldn’t make sense of what was happening. Laurelin’s light had been lost the last time he’d been here, and the sky had been black. Now the Sun’s golden rays had replaced it: softer, paler, laced with an edge of pink. This new light rushed through Feanor sugar-bright and warmed his cold, still body, and he decided he liked it better. 

_ Sit up, Feanaro,  _ a smooth voice said. Feanor flinched, throwing a hand over his face, but there was no one around. It sounded as if it had come from inside his head. His limbs were stiff from disuse, but he slowly complied. 

_ Walk toward the golden path.  _

He did, legs dragging laboriously through the silky wheat. Was this some kind of fever dream? 

The second his feet touched the gold stones, three blinding objects clattered to the ground in front of him. Feanor cried out and stumbled backward, losing his balance. “Get away from me!” he cried, shielding his eyes. “Get away-- _get_ _a-away!”_

He turned and ran on shaking legs, mind reeling because the Silmarils could not be  _ here,  _ there was no way, they were haunting him with their presence. Those cursed things-- those filthy, bloody  _ things  _ shaped by his own hands laying there at his feet like three severed organs-- he could not bear to look at them, could not bear to say their name. The strings that had once tied the Silmarils to his heart now snapped, stealing the breath from his lungs. Feanor’s ankle twisted and he crumpled in the pale grass, shuddering, still pleading “Leave me alone, leave me, please--!” 

_ Repent.  _

“I have,” he panted, tears pricking at his eyes as he squeezed them shut. “I have-- I  _ have!  _ Get them away from me, please, please destroy them, I can’t bear it--” 

_ They are gone, Feanaro. It was merely an illusion. The real Silmarils are lost forever.  _ The voice sounded less hypnotic and more wryly soothing now.  _ You can open your eyes.  _

He did, warily, blinking the hot blurriness away. The harsh white light was gone, and the owner of the voice was sitting cross-legged in the wheat, gold hair shining under the Sun. “Artanis,” he croaked. “Why--” 

“Do you know where you are, Feanaro?” she asked. 

He thought he did, but-- but everything was so lost now. He put his hands over his eyes and tried to rip the memory of the Silmarils to shreds. “N-no.” 

“Your  _ fea _ fully repented, so your  _ hroa _ was able to leave the Void. You’re back in Valinor now.” Artanis looked pensive, running a slender hand through the gold fronds at her feet. A faint memory resurfaced in Feanor’s mind: she had been called  _ Galadriel  _ in Beleriand. 

“My sons,” Feanor said, both longing for and dreading her answer. “Will they-- are they capable of doing the same?”

“That will depend on the state of their individual  _ feas _ ,” Artanis answered, looking straight through him with her piercing eyes. 

Feanor shivered. “I-I see.” 

…

Artanis told him he had the freedom to leave the golden field, if he wished. “I don’t want to,” Feanor said, struggling to draw breath. 

Even if he sat here in the fragrant grass and waited until the end of time, no one would ever understand why he stared at the empty blue sky till his eyes glazed over, searching for silhouettes that might never come. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the rest of the void-punishments (plus maglor, whose punishment was to stay alive) and FINALLY, feanor's redemption, or the start of it, anyway. :3


	15. 15

Light poured into the center of the field like honey from a jar. Feanor’s eyes were getting heavy. Time didn’t pass normally here. He could have been waiting for a week or an age; it was all the same to him now. 

Then-- a crack; a flash of white; a sharp gasp. A crumpled body in the wheat. Hair like brilliant flame. Tears poured out of Feanor’s tired eyes. The scars on Maedhros’s face were all gone, melted away, and he was  _ solid  _ and  _ real  _ when he clasped him in his shaking hands. 

“I want to wait with you, Atar,” he said, and Feanor had to cover his eyes to hide his tears because he didn’t  _ look _ like he’d ever been near lava, but oh, in his voice, the pain was there. “But I need to see-- Atar, I’m so sorry, I never told you about us, but--” Maedhros’s brand-new right hand shook, remembering all the times it had gripped a hilt in the Void, slashing through a vulnerable wrist again and again and again. 

“I know,” Feanor said. Of course he did. He’d watched Maedhros’s whole life and death unfold on that Valar-forsaken screen, and he’d be damned if he was going to withhold his blessing now. “Go. Findekano will be waiting for you.” 

…

The Ambarussa came back at the same time. They cried to be able to hold and touch each other. But they wanted to see Nerdanel, and Feanor wiped his eyes and held his tongue and let them go. He did not linger on the pang that resounded deep in his chest, the thought that she was here in Valinor yet had not come to see him. It was best he do the waiting alone. 

…

Caranthir lay spread-eagled in the grass and fought to catch his breath. The hole in his chest was mended, but the tear tracks on his face were still there. Feanor held him and stroked his rumpled hair. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, pushing back thoughts of the ghost who’d tormented him, the black liquid that had oozed from its sockets. “I’m so sorry.” There was nothing else he could say. 

Caranthir went to the healing-house with his brothers, still broken but starting to mend. Maedhros was there too with Fingon, and Amrod and Amras-- or so Feanor was told. He had never been himself to the cottage by the silver sea, for it had not existed in the old Valinor: there had been no need for it until after his departure. He would not leave the golden field until all seven of his sons had returned, and if that meant forever, so be it. 

…

“Get away from me,” Curufin said feebly, curling in on himself. “I didn’t kill you. I didn’t-- I didn’t!” 

Feanor sighed and knelt carefully in the silt. “Curufin…” 

His favorite son gripped his own gaunt shoulders and shuddered like the name was a thorn in his side. “Don’t-- don’t-- don’t call me that.” 

“Curvo, then,” Feanor said on a slow exhale. “Curvo, please open your eyes. You’re safe now. I promise.” 

He held him down, held him still, marveling at the birdlike fragility of his bones, so breakable, and watched him squint into the sky. The blackness of his irises didn’t seem so flinty now. Curufin--  _ Curvo--  _ shivered and went still, the Sun’s beams lighting up the hollows of his cheeks. 

“You’re going to be all right,” Feanor said. “In time.” 

…

Maglor was wringing his hands in that way he always did when he was nervous. Feanor could only half-believe he was really there. “Kanafinwe…” 

“I sailed across,” he said, voice pitching high. He was so thin, so grey, a faded shadow. “The last of the elves were leaving; I couldn’t wait any longer. Atar-- I’m so tired. I’m just so tired.” 

Feanor opened his arms slowly, voice faltering. “Kano-- I am so sorry. I hardly know what to say. I don’t deserve your forgiveness.” If he could turn back time and erase all his mistakes, he would do it in an instant, and it still wouldn’t be enough. Nothing he could do now would ever be enough. 

But-- “I forgive you,” Maglor said, clinging tight, dripping tears on Feanor’s shoulder. “Of course I forgive you, Atar.” And all Feanor could do was hug back and weep too as the light washed over his reborn shoulders like gold dust, knowing this was so much more than he ever merited. 

After a moment longer, Maglor pulled carefully away, searching Feanor’s face with a clear somberness in his wet eyes. “The others,” he said, setting his jaw as if to brace himself for bad news. “Please tell me I’m not the first to return.” The unspoken  _ or the only  _ hung solidly in the space between them. 

“No,” Feanor said, taking a deep breath and letting it settle in his lungs. “No, not the first.” 

Maglor’s face crumpled. “I tried so hard to be last,” he whispered. “I wanted-- I  _ had  _ to be last. This isn’t how it was supposed to go.” 

“I know.” Feanor weighed his words carefully, fresh tears pricking at the space behind his eyes. He knelt slowly, feeling the silky grass crumple under his weight, the warm Sun at his back. Something in him told him that he had to phrase this just right, that this was  _ important _ . “Kano… you may wait with me, if you like.” 

…

The Sun gleamed and flashed. The wheat rustled in the breeze, slim strands bleached white. Feanor and Maglor sat in a pocket of shadow at the field’s edge and waited. 

And waited, and waited, and waited. 

Maglor wove thin stems into neat little braids and then ripped them apart. Feanor kept his eyes peeled open and longed for an end. When they had to eat, they plucked fruit from the trees and tossed the cores into the woods. When they had to sleep-- well, Maglor slept. Feanor didn’t. His eyes constantly itched and his mind constantly fidgeted, but if this was how he was going to live for the rest of forever, he could blame no one but himself. 

“Atar,” Maglor said at last, quietly. He cast down his eyes. Feanor bit his lip and tasted blood. “I don’t think Tyelko is coming back.” 

…

The sky turned grey fast, thick clouds lit up in shards of lightning, growing dark with rain aching to fall. The final body hit the storm-soaked grass with a dull thud. A scream pushed at the back of Feanor’s throat. 

…

“Don’t touch me!” Celegorm said wildly, trying to twist out of Feanor’s grip. “Don’t touch me!” He pulled back his fist and let it collide,  _ hard,  _ with Feanor’s shoulder. 

They fought for a moment. Rain slicked both of their faces, fingers scrabbling in wetness, round blown eyes struck with panic. “Stop--  _ stop, _ ” Feanor demanded, grabbing his wrists. “You’re not in your right mind, Tyelkormo, stop,  _ think--”  _

“You don’t understand,” Celegorm said, and Feanor swallowed tears because he did, he  _ did.  _ He took a hasty step back, hands out; a warning. “Don’t come near me. I can’t fucking do this again. I-I  _ won’t.”  _

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Feanor pleaded, reaching out as slow and gentle as he could, watching his trembling hands light up in another streak of lightning. “Just calm down.” He was corralling his own son like some rabid animal, splashing around in soggy grass trying to keep him from self-destructing, and it was so utterly  _ his fault  _ he wanted to cry. 

Feanor’s fingertips just barely brushed Celegorm’s sleeve. “Don’t  _ touch  _ me!” He jerked backward so violently he slipped in the mud. “You can’t, you can’t,” he gasped, struggling to sit up. “Don’t you understand? I’m gonna kill you. I hurt the things I touch.” 


	16. 16

White light pooled on the floorboards beneath the open window. Maedhros leaned nervously against the sill, cradling his new right hand gingerly as he was wont to do now, still growing used to the fact that it was there. “They are all improving,” he said, casting his eyes carefully down. 

“I want you to be honest with me, Nelyafinwe,” Feanor said firmly. 

Maedhros was silent for several seconds, biting his lip. “The healers say Moryo is nearly ready to be discharged. Curvo and Tyelko have made… less progress.” He looked down again, tracing the sunbeams’ path as the light snaked through the tiny fissures in the wood, tiny glimmers of dust suspended in the air. 

Maedhros never spoke about his own time in the healing-house, and Feanor never asked. But he imagined him re-learning to hold a quill in his new hand, imagined Fingon sitting on the edge of the desk, smile lit up gold in the Sun-- how lucky he was, to have a person to guide him through. Imagined the nightmares and the cold sweats and the panic coming out in short, tight bursts as it left his body. “I understand,” Feanor said quietly, throat hurting. “But I… if there was any way I could help, you know I would do it in an instant.” 

Finally Maedhros looked up, and there was trust in his green eyes, and pity too. “You blame yourself, and so did I for a long time. But you have to realize not all of this was your fault. You never could have known… none of us could have known…” 

“I’ve done so much wrong,” Feanor said hoarsely. “So much-- I should have loved them more. I should have loved all of you more.” 

“You’re loving us now,” Maedhros said gently, “and that’s enough. But--” he took a shaky breath-- “the waiting isn’t over yet.” 

…

Feanor woke frequently in the night, plummeting out of half-finished dreams with the urge to walk, to search. He found the pool in a clearing at forest’s edge, and the odd familiarity of the stars glinting on its surface made him stop. His heart wrenched when he realized he’d been here before, with Cel-- with  _ Tyelko,  _ four ages ago. It had been day then, warm-gold-bright, and his son had splashed around in the water and gotten Feanor all wet, laughing and shouting about minnows. He closed his eyes and folded the memory carefully away for a time when it hurt less to remember. Then he knelt at the dewy bank and looked through the glassy surface. 

_ Small hands. Birdsong. The sharp tang of berries on the tongue. You’re my only friend, Irisse. The great low thrum of Orome’s horn. Adrenaline, feet pounding. The swift nock of an arrow meeting its mark. Blinding gems. Twigs snapping. Come meet your new brother, Tyelko. The crinkle of leaves on naked skin. Dried blood under blunt fingernails. The Sun, new and red. Clattering hooves. Does it fucking matter, Kano? Vultures circling. A bruised collarbone. Cold marble. Release. Darkness. Loss. Loss. Loss. Loss. Don’t touch me. Don’t touch me--! _

A hand came down on Feanor’s shoulder, and he reeled backward, breathing hard. “Calm down,” murmured a voice he hadn’t heard in many lifetimes. “It’s just me.” 

Nerdanel was unchanged _ ,  _ down to every last curl, and all Feanor could think of was how much damage he’d done in the time they’d been apart, how much horror he’d seen, how wide of a canyon he’d put between them. He opened his mouth to say  _ I’m sorry,  _ to say  _ forgive me,  _ and what came out instead was “What is this? I just, I just saw--” 

“The pool? It’s just a pool,” Nerdanel said. “The vision was yours, though. Did it hurt?” 

Feanor searched her face and found no malice there, no blame. Just mild frankness, the way she always was, the way she always had been. “Yes,” he admitted. 

“I’m sorry,” she said simply, and pulled him in. 

“No,” Feanor said, shaking in the familiar circle of her arms, “I’m the one who should be sorry. I left you-- I caused all this--” 

“What’s done has already been done, Feanaro.” Nerdanel’s eyes were gentle. They sat at the pool’s edge together and watched the shiny surface ripple in the breeze. 

…

So many familiar faces. So many people Feanor had watched die. The jagged slashes the wolf’s claws had left on Finrod’s perfect skin were gone. Turgon was holding Elenwe’s hand, spotless robes brushed clean of crumbling bits of the tower that had crushed him. Angrod and Aegnor were unburnt and whole. Fingolfin, the half-brother he’d once hated with a burning passion, stood straight and proud, even offering Feanor a wry smile. Feanor said “I’m sorry” so many times the words started to taste like nonsense in his mouth, heard so many “I forgive you”s they blended together in his head, but the remorse in his  _ fea  _ throbbed just as sharp. 

Aredhel stepped up in her white dress, hole in her heart all mended, and demanded, “Take me to him,” and Feanor could have cried at the power in her eyes. 

“The healers don’t often allow visitors,” he said. “I don’t know if they’ll be persuaded to--” 

Her stare could have melted stone. “They will.” 

…

“Don’t t--” 

“Shut up,” she said lovingly, and pushed him up against the wall, hugging him roughly. As the minutes slipped by and Aredhel didn’t crumble into ash, the panic in Celegorm’s eyes faded into pure, overwhelming relief. 

…

In the centuries since their absence, Nerdanel’s old garden had fallen into ruin, overflowing with greenery that curled and crept over every surface. Feanor strangely preferred it this way, cobwebs, chipped fountain and all: it looked wild, unchecked, a relic of all that had happened since the golden days. 

Celegorm traced the mossy cracks in the wooden bench with his fingers, resisting meeting his gaze. Feanor was suddenly reminded of the fact that he hadn’t had a serious conversation with his third son since-- well,  _ ever. _ Where to even begin? “Tyelkormo,” he said awkwardly. “I-- I am so glad to see you healed at last.” 

Celegorm did look up then, and the shield of apathy wavered and finally vanished from his eyes. “It’s not that simple.” He struggled in silence for a moment, trying to find the right words. “Healing is… different than forgetting. I can’t just  _ forget  _ what I-- who I am.” 

Feanor wanted so badly to refute that, to protest:  _ but you aren’t that person anymore, you’ve changed!  _ But the heavy feeling in his chest told him Celegorm was right. “I know,” he said instead, voice low. “And neither can I. None of us can. That’s the thing about repentance, though, isn’t it? It forces us to carry those memories with us forever, as a reminder of how we’ve changed.” 

Celegorm turned his head so his face was half-hidden in shadow. “It’s not fair,” he muttered. “Why should we get a second chance at all? I-- I didn’t want that. For so long I just wanted to be done. I was-- I still am-- a danger to everyone else.” 

The Sun, halfway slipped behind the clouds, cast a few thin rays down onto the cracked stone floor, illuminating in silver the relics of lost time. “I wish I knew the reasoning behind Eru’s grand plan,” Feanor said quietly. “But I will always be glad you came back.” 

“I didn’t even know what I was doing,” Celegorm said, and suddenly he was crying, flushing and scrubbing roughly at his face like he was furious with his tears for daring to fall. “I fucked everything up. I… I thought once I died the world would just be rid of me. I didn’t want this redemption bullshit. I didn’t, I  _ don’t _ deserve it.” 

“Tyelkormo--” 

Celegorm shrugged Feanor’s hand off his shoulder, eyes blazing. “You know what? I thought I really did kill Irisse and Curvo. I thought that for  _ months _ after I came out of the Void, because I knew I did it in real life. I lost every single person that m-mattered, and it was my own damn fault.” 

_ “It was my fault,” Tyelko wailed, showing Feanaro the fractured pieces of Kano’s harp. The wooden bench was glossy and new, the shrubs on either side immaculately trimmed, and his feet didn’t touch the ground, but his hair was that same unnatural silver. “I dropped it off the roof, but I swear I didn’t mean to make it b- _ break _ …”  _

Feanor blinked and the memory rippled away. “I know,” he said finally, swallowing hard. “I-- I understand feeling like all of this is undeserved. We will always be kinslayers, and no amount of second chances can make us forget that.” His throat ached and he wasn’t even sure he was making sense, but it felt healing, somehow, to let words just pour out of his mouth unedited. “But you’ll also always be my son.” 

Celegorm put his hands over his face and breathed out slow, and for a second he was an elfling with a scraped knee again: too young to know Feanor as anything but  _ atar,  _ too young to know any greater pain than the sting of blood welling on pale little-boy skin. “You should have had a better son than me.” 

“You should have had a better father,” Feanor said fiercely, and finally,  _ finally,  _ Celegorm let him pull him into a hug. It was slightly awkward: Celegorm was much bigger than him, and shaking like a leaf, and Feanor’s arms were stiff and out of practice. But he didn’t flinch away, didn’t say  _ don’t touch me,  _ and the acceptance, the  _ rightness _ of it was like elixir, like gold dust, like ten thousand damned Silmarils. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i can't believe this fic is finally over! this was the first longfic i've ever written, and i had such a positive experience publishing it. thank you so much to everyone who took the time to read and/or comment, and special thanks to Shiro for their amazingly detailed comments on every chapter; they were truly the highlights of posting days! i'm going to miss updating this, and i really hope the story resonated with you guys as much as it did for me!  
> <3, ifearnocolors


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